Harry Potter: Coming Out On Top
by ManMadeofLasers
Summary: Harry Potter gets the short end of the stick, I think we can all agree. But what if, in a strange twist of fate, every time Harry James Potter met adverse circumstance he always ended out on top? Bad things always happen to the hero, but in this case the hero rides these events to the top. Very WIP, not a serious fic.
1. Prologue

Prologue

November first, 1981 was a new day. A changed day. November first was a day that would have been unrecognizable from just twenty four hours before.

Twenty four hours before was Samhain. Halloween. The beginning of the dark half of the year. It was the time when humanity's ancestors took their flocks in and culled them in preparation for the coming cold. This was the time that changed the fate of the world, a fate which had been building for more than a decade.

On this day, in the wee hours of the morning, the self-styled Dark Lord Voldemort came knocking at a charming cottage in the village of Godric's Hollow. He sought to end the life of one prophesied to destroy him, and as is so often the case with prophecies, in doing so he brought about his own destruction.

The charming cottage in the valley that was Godric's Hollow was property of the Ancient and Noble House of Potter, and was inhabited by a couple and their child. James Charlus Potter, Lily Marie Potter, and young Harry James Potter.

That quiet and dark morning was interrupted by fire, lightning, the roar and clash of conjured creatures, and finally the silence of death. The gods alone know what transpired in that small home, but the results were free for anyone to see. James and Lily, loving parents and caring friends, were killed. Tom Marvolo Riddle, the Dark Lord, was banished. Harry survived, marked for his short time on this mortal coil by shadowed memories of a family he would never know and a scar on his head.

In the coming years many would remark on the scar. Some would say it looked like a lightning bolt. Others would see it as a mark of a life yet to be lived, a rune forged in the dark heart of a magical event, Sowilō, the mark of the sun. The mark of the purifying light.

Only a sad few would truly see it for what it was. A permanent reminder to a young orphan of what he had lost, nothing more, and in the cruel dance of fate, nothing less.

* * *

><p>Mere hours from that act of prophecy Harry James potter was plucked from the wreckage of his home, and by the order of the reigning leader of the times, sent to live with his last remaining blood relatives. Vernon and Petunia Dursley.<p>

The young couple knew the boy was different. They knew his parents, and they knew the boy was part of something much larger than their lives would ever reach. They hated him for it. Harry was neglected, sentenced to live in a cupboard, a space unfit for even the storage of cleaning supplies. They did not feed him as the tiny child needed, ignoring his cries. They spared no band-aids, no sippy-cups, and no object not already at least third hand for the boy.

They had their own son, Dudley, a son who grew around, but untouched by, this deprivation. Dudley grew, and he acted on the examples he was given, and soon Harry was target practice for the youngest Dursley and all of his friends. The neighborhood boys were not gentle, and they were not reserved. Without an adult telling them when enough was enough bones were broken and blood was spilled. They behaved with the same intolerance and anger that only children can have. Vernon and Petunia were careful to never touch the boy themselves, they had no need to after all, and by an understanding reached inside Harry's earshot, nothing was done in view of the adults letting their abuse of, and power over, this boy continue.

Sometimes life, sometimes magic, and sometimes fate are each curious things. However these actions did not break a child who denied knowledge even of his own name. No. These collective actions forged steel inside the young boy. Fear and adversity enough to destroy anyone else just fed the fire inside him. There was a reason the boy was injured so. He never backed down. His hide bore the work of a gang of budding thugs and he fought them as best he could, knowing that if he didn't no one would.

Thus the stage is set for our tale. In another world, many have remarked that Harry Potter was fate's whipping boy and fate's bitch. What if, on one day early in the year 1990, fortunes were reversed, and instead Harry made fate his bitch?

* * *

><p><strong>[AN] 1.13.2016 : **Hey guys! As of today I've updated and corrected the story. I've fixed every spelling error I could find, patched up the three or four huge plot holes I accidentally made for myself, and generally improved the lot of it. I removed a few different pointless fanfic cliches, and a few different manufactured conflicts that felt forced or pointless. I even deleted all of the all of my whiny author's notes! In general, the whole thing is better. I hope you like it!


	2. Chapter 1:Wherein fortunes are changed

Chapter One: Wherein fortunes are changed

Today was one of the days the Boy hated and feared most in the year, the day of Aunt Petunia's annual shopping trip. The Boy was never certain where _they_ found the money for it, but every year on September second the Dursleys went out and had themselves a massive shopping spree. Vernon got a new lawn mower (which the Boy would be forced to use), Dudley was given all of the latest and greatest books, video games, and computer things (which he would subsequently break and the Boy would be forced to repair), and Petunia would get brand new kitchenware and make-up (thankfully the Boy was only expected to take care of the kitchenware). The entire family (sans the Boy) would also get a new full wardrobe to go with their new possessions.

This all was angering, but given what the Boy had seen and faced, completely tolerable, he had seen worse.

No.

The reason The Boy hated and feared this day was because it was the one time in the year in which they actively took him from the house, and Dudley was left with him alone in stores that had display sets of power tools, knives, abrasive cleaning supplies, and other things which the Boy had found to be worrisome in the hands of his tormentor.

The Boy did his level best during the day to stay out of the way. The difficulty was that he had to stay within sight of his relatives at all times, lest he be left behind again. Last time the trip home had taken him the better part of two days and the good will of no less than four separate transit attendants. He had to not only find where home was, but also get back. When he had finally found his way to Privet Drive, he was locked out and left to the mercies of Dudley's gang for a further day and a half before being let back in and sent to his cupboard.

Sometimes the Boy fancied himself one of the ninjas that he read about in the public library. He had gotten quite good over the years at being near enough to follow his relatives, but far enough away or out of sight enough to not attract the attention of his god-forsaken cousin. It hurt less when he made it a game, so he went with that.

But the library. Now there was a thought. The Boy could be there right now, reading and hiding in the back stacks. He could be reading and trying again to figure out the right way to hold a pen to write. Ever since his first year at school, when the Dursleys had so forcibly taken him from his class and claimed they were home-schooling him, the Boy had been trying to figure out how to write. He was rubbish at it and it bothered him, so whenever he was lucky enough to get away he practiced.

Today though, he had no such luck. Today he found himself cornered in the cast-iron cookware section of Petunia's favorite high-end kitchen store in London. Today, his cousin was running full tilt down an isle bearing a 40 cm heavy cast iron pan, wielding it like one of the samurai from the movies he enjoyed so much. Today, the Boy tensed all of the muscles in his torso and tried his best to absorb the blow that he was sure was going to take him forever to heal from.

Dudley made contact with the pan, despite a last moment desperate dodge, and the Boy's world devolved into pain. The Boy could feel the bones in his chest (ribs and sternum, he noted through the pain, anatomy texts had proved invaluable to his medical efforts in the past) snap as the energy of the blow broke his chest and knocked through the plate glass window behind him.

Adrenaline sparked through the Boy's nervous system, hitting his brain, slowing his perception of time for a moment and causing his mind to race. He hoped against hope that the bones were going to hold together and nothing had broken off. The texts had been clear on that, floating bone pieces could puncture organs. He wasn't one hundred percent clear on all of the organs or what they did, but he got that they were vital and that puncturing them was something that he couldn't deal with in his cupboard.

But as he analyzed his pain, he felt something new. Something not-pain. A tingle raced through him, like a deep itch or when Dudley discovered what the wires behind the outlets in the wall did to a sleeping Boy.

The itch, the tingle, the whatever it was moved through his chest, and unless the Boy was mistaking the feeling of broken bones (it was possible, he had never broken a rib before) it sealed the breaks he thought he felt. His mind flashed through confusion and a hint of joy! Wrapping up broken ribs was described as painful and debilitating. The boy would be expected to break in all of their new toys over the next few days, and the damage he expected from his cousin's strike would have made it agony close to even his breaking point.

Then he hit the window behind him and not even the adrenaline in his system was enough to keep him conscious. The plate glass window of course did what any window would do under the kind of stress a flying nine year old would impart. It broke into sharp chunks and flew everywhere. As he passed by the shards cascaded over him, ripping the Boy's hand-me-downs and skin with equal ease.

Larger sections of glass fell on the boy as he passed through the threshold of the window proper, causing massive damage to parts of his head and face, and effectively shredding the oh-so-distinctive mark on his forehead. His upper body was also not spared the wrath the glass, and while his shirt soaked up most of the damage, it finally took enough abuse to give up the ghost entirely, effectively baring him to the waist.

The Boy passed completely through the window, and with terrible accuracy hit a girl on the other side of the window. The girl was young, also nine years old in fact, and had strawberry-blonde hair (leaning more towards the strawberry than the blonde) down to her elbows, a cute button nose, and brown eyes. She took the impact of a flying nine year old like a champ, but no one could be hit by something the weighed just as much as they did like that and remain standing. The boy was fortunately enough positioned to shield the young girl from the minor hailstorm of glass that accompanied him.

As the glass settled, the girl could be heard whimpering beneath the Boy. There was an instant of calm, like the silence between thunderclaps in the middle of a storm. Dudley had a victorious expression on his face. Petunia was looking at the window and was mid-haggle with the salesman over the very pan her son had used on her nephew, poorly concealing a vindictive smirk. Vernon stood behind her facing the window, not even bothering to conceal his expression of dark satisfaction.

But for the first time in the Boy's life, despite the power they held over him, they weren't the important ones in this scenario. On the Boy's side of the glass stood a stern and imposing woman. Steel grey hair and dark blue eyes accented her expression of concern and anger. Her Susan, her only living relative in this world, had been hurt, a situation that would be explained if she had anything to do with it, and Amelia Susan Bones was a woman who would not be denied. The matter of another small and wounded child only made her more intent on her duty.

The silent instant between moments passed, and life resumed. Amelia's wand appeared in her hand and she tapped it to her old auror's badge (she had never been more glad that she refused to relinquish it when she was appointed head of the DMLE). She pushed a bit of magic through to the badge, and with back-up thus summoned she turned her full attention to the situation in front of her.

Years of being on the front line against some of the foulest wizard's to grace the Queen's shores gave her the ability to pick up the essence of a scene in an instant. She didn't miss the expressions on the aggressor's parent's faces, and she didn't miss the joy on the suspect's (her mind having made the distinction automatically) face. Her eyes flicked down to the victim who covered her niece. His shirt was in tatters, exposing a heavily scarred chest.

Amelia's mind was halfway through the motions for a silent _repairo_ before the instinct guiding it short circuited and went back to the boy's chest. The spell fizzled as her attention turned from the spell to the track marks of pain covering his body. Short precise cuts that she idly attributed to a cutting curse or knife work marred the child's left side. Scars that lacked the same neat precision covered his abs and went along to his right. These looked more like punctures than slices, the back of her mind fit thrown objects of blast shrapnel to the pattern as her gaze moved to his overall state. The child's ribs appeared intact (her mind calculating the force of the blow and assigning accidental magic as the cause) as did the rest of his bones. The problem was more that all of his bones were visible under a very middling sheet of muscles. Add in the fact that the boy was clearly as old as her Susan but much smaller and the already whining alarm bells in the back of her head began screaming as her experience supplied malnutrition as the cause.

The boy had an unruly tangle of the blackest hair she had ever seen, and his eyes were a vivid green. From his glasses north was just one massive wound, shards of glass still visible in his skin.

She sighed and closed her eyes to get a moment of calm. This was now a child abuse case, not just an accident that she was mildly over-reacting to. The part of her that hated criminals cheered at seeing unbroken ribs, even as it cried foul from being able count each of them. Only accidental magic could have kept them whole, which brought the monsters responsible for the boy's state squarely into her jurisdiction.

Amelia completed her instinctive _repairo_ at the glass window, sending all of the shards back into their original places in the window and doing double duty by removing the pieces embedded in the boy and his clothes. The glass pulled from the small boy's head joined in with the rest of the window, embedding a reddish tint to its section.

Now the head of the Department of Magical Law enforcement was literally seeing red.

Telltale pops from a group of three aurors and a master obliviator saw Amelia gently but quickly removing the unconscious boy from her niece. She spared the boy a whispered _episkey_ for his forehead, before ensuring her Susan was okay. A moment's commands saw the boy's evident abusers rounded up, an entire city block's worth of non-magicals missing about fifteen minutes of their afternoon, and two injured kids popped over to St. Mungo's Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries.

* * *

><p>The Boy regained consciousness in an instant. In the past, a slow transition from sleep or unconsciousness to wakefulness had cost him. He did his best to look like he was still asleep and listened in around him, Dudley knew where he slept after all.<p>

"…and scarring that wouldn't look out of place on an auror," _auror_, he thought, turning the unfamiliar word around in his head as the voice next to his bed continued, "and he has all of the classic signs of malnutrition. You were right about the accidental magic too," _Magic? I wasn't hurt enough to hallucinate, haven't in a long time, what is this?_, "It looks strongly like the only thing holding him up for the last few years at least has been his magic. I wouldn't be surprised if he has never done any significant accidental magic before, his core has been constantly draining just to keep him up and walking around."

A new voice spoke up from his left, it had a definite edge to it, "I don't care what happens Andi, this boy will only see those _people_ again over my dead body."

"He's Nymphadora's age, Amy you can get in line."

The Boy relaxed at that. They had no reason to lie to him while he was asleep. Tension he wasn't aware of carrying melted off of him. He might be free of the Dursleys. Stiffness fleeing his joints caused his to relax just a bit into the amazing mattress behind him, a movement which caught the attention of his attendants.

"Seems like he's woken up. If you can, please sit up," came the voice of the Andi person to his right.

He opened his eyes and looked around. He was in some kind of sterile smelling white place. Curtains penned him and the people near him into a roughly ten by ten area, the air smelled a bit like the bleach Petunia made him use, and it was filled with the sounds of quiet hustling and bustling. It was a rather telling statement that with what he had been through he had never seen a hospital and so couldn't recognize one.

To his left was a woman who projected authority with more force than any police officer, store manager, or librarian the Boy had ever seen. Beside her was a young girl, and on his right what looked like a nurse or something with the most piercing violet eyes he had ever seen.

He moved to a sitting position, bracing himself for the pain from the large bruise on his chest, and when he didn't feel any such pain amazement was plain on his face. Once in a more vertical position he pulled at the top of the white gown thing he found himself in and looked down at his chest. It looked better than it had ever been, even before he got knocked through a window. The scars from Dudley throwing rocks at him and Piers Polkiss' flick knife looked like they had been healed for years, and not the month and a half it had really been.

"Why am I wearing a different set of clothes?" he croaked, and then as his mind followed that line of reasoning to it's end he whispered, "Oh god, you saw me, didn't you?"

Amelia saw the arc of his expression. First wonder at how he wasn't in pain any more, and moments later the brutal crash when he realized they had seen his scars. The mother in her could do nothing less than move to his side and draw him into a hug. He was stiff in her arms, but then she spoke.

"It will be okay. You're safe now. No more scars. And you will never see those people again. I swear on my life, you will never see them again."

The Boy didn't soften, but after a moment returned the hug awkwardly. Amelia could only guess, perhaps it was a lack of experience, or even a lack of trust, but she was encouraged by the quiet response.

"Thank you."

* * *

><p>The people in the sterile place, and the Boy soon learned that it was in fact a hospital, had begun asking him a hundred question a minute practically from the moment that Amelia released him. It was all about his treatment, his diet, the story behind this scar or another. They seemed pretty genuine, and tricks weren't really what the relatives did. In fact their anger at the relatives was the most real emotion he saw on most of them. So he cooperated.<p>

Two questions provoked the strongest reaction from them though. The first was also the first question they had asked period. It was simple, but the insight it gave the hospital staff and aurors into the Boy's life was unparalleled.

The question was elegant in its simplicity, "What is your name?"

The boy looked around the room, weighing the expression on faces. The nurses, the Amy lady, the Andi lady, the pair of people in weird clothes that asked the question, "I'm not sure. It starts with an 'H', I saw it on a paper once for school. They didn't have some kind of information the school wanted about me though, so I never ended up going. They call me 'Boy', but I've read enough to know that isn't a real name people have."

Andi and Amelia both stiffened. They shared some kind of inscrutable look at that particular tidbit of information, and without responding each left the room. The Boy was left in the room with the others. The healer lady with the medicine had her eyes on a watch, but she seemed to be holding it really hard. A man in plain white robes, and a man in a red cloak stood near the door, each looking just really… sad. The Boy saw it all and in particular noticed as the young girl that had followed Amy in sidled up to the bed and sat next to it.

"I'm sorry you don't have a name. My name is Susan, The lady with the grey hair is my aunty. Aunty Amelia. She brought me in so you could have someone not old to talk to. If all you know of your name is 'H', can I call you H?"

He liked her in an instant. She was earnest and she was nice. Kids like her were the reason for half of the trouble he got himself into. He couldn't stand to see them be bullied, but the same sort of niceness that he liked was exactly what made Dudley and his gang attack.

"I… I guess that'd be okay. I never really thought about names, it's never been important. It's always just been something other people had. Yeah... Yeah," the newly christened H looked up and met the girl's eyes, "Call me H."

Susan cracked a massive smile and held out her hand, "Pleased to meet you, H. I'm Susan."

A smile formed slowly on his face in response, H moved and returned the gesture, shaking her hand with a smile and a comic sense of false gravity.

The second question that had provoked a huge reaction from the hospital people had come much later, and actually had been asked by Susan.

She was sitting on a chair next to his bed and on a whim touched H's mass of hair.

"H, when was the last time you had a haircut?"

Amelia and Andi heard the question despite their conversation, and both looked like this was another of the causal questions they didn't want the answer to. An intern that had been taking notes in the back of the room gave a tired sigh. Evidence against his relatives had been stacking up all day, but that didn't make each piece of it any less troubling.

H sat for a full minute in silence, eyes scrunched up into a nine year old's adorable 'I'm thinking' pose.

"I… I think I had one when I was four? It was a long time ago. I'm not really sure, why?"

Most in the room looked shocked, but H could tell this was a different shock than when they had asked him if he had ever seen a 'doctor' before or where he slept.

Andi broke in with, "H, we've been keeping it a little below board, but I'm sure you have heard a few mentions of magic, haven't you?"

"I sort of thought I misheard that."

"No," Andi said, "You weren't hearing wrong. We wanted to break it to you gently, but this requires an explanation. Magic is real, H. Here, watch."

From the huge sleeves of the strange white robes she was wearing, Andi pulled out a small perfectly straight piece of wood. She waved it, and the blanket that was laying on top of H's legs shrank, pulled in on itself, and transformed into a small and beautiful black kitten.

H gasped audibly, and stuck a small quivering hand in front of the kitten. The small black cat sniffed his hand gently, and deciding he wasn't a threat, followed the hand to its source, flopping down in H's lap. H tickled and pet the kitten gently, his ministrations soon resulting in a surprisingly deep purr.

"H, are you sure you haven't had a haircut since you were five, you've never cut your own hair, nothing like that?"

H's attention was focused completely on the purring lump of fur, so his response was somewhat absent-minded, "Nope. I always thought hair didn't grow. _They_ left sometimes talking about haircuts, and they came back with different hair. It was shorter, but I always thought it was all wigs like I saw once on the telly."

H looked up and met her eyes, "Should it grow? Petunia said she would cut it once , and shaved me entirely bald 'cause she said she didn't like my hair. I hated it, but the next day all of it was back. Maybe I made it grow. I could try again," H's voice and manner was bright and cheery, "Let me try!"

H closed his eyes and his whole face scrunched in concentration. His hair immediately grew until it was about halfway down to the kitten still playing in his lap. He opened his eyes again.

"Is this good?" taking a hand from the cat he pushed a few locks out of his eyes and blew ineffectually at it, "I think I liked it shorter."

The intern in the back of the room fell out of his chair in a dead faint.

* * *

><p>Four days later, H laid back in the most comfortable bed he had ever even heard of. The witches and wizards at the hospital had taken a number of small samples of his blood; a dozen had run their wands over him in so many patterns that he couldn't even begin to distinguish between them. He drank, by his count, twenty seven different kinds of potions, some several times a day. From what the healers called muscle stimulants to what they said would reveal who his parents were.<p>

According to them that last kind failed to give any kind of results, so H still didn't know who his parents were. For the first time in his life though, that didn't feel like a big deal. Amelia Bones had adopted him somewhere along the line during those days, and H could honestly say he had never been happier.

He was waiting for the other shoe to drop, but he was possessed by the wisdom he had read in the diary of a soldier from World War I. You never turn down food, because you can't be sure when your next meal will be, and you never turn down an hour's sleep, because you never know when you'll need it. H was going to take all the comfort and affection he could, and let tomorrow worry about itself for a little while.

His whole life he had to fight and bleed for anything remotely good to happen. No teacher or janitor or policeman, anyone really, had ever listened to him. No one had ever helped him. Now he had a nice sister, he found out he was a wizard of all things, he found out he was a shape changer thing, and he had a full name. He was H Bones.

Amelia promised him that he would be safe, and H believed she meant it. He was still going to memorise the exits and all the hiding places he could find. He already had a small stash of small pieces of cloth for bandages and a few Jacob's cream crackers hidden underneath his mattress. It had never once hurt him to be prepared.


	3. Chapter 2: Settling In

Chapter Two: Settling in

Amelia was confused. She was unused to being confused, and in point of fact did not appreciate the feeling. The fact that the reasons for her confusion were a family of child abusing thugs didn't improve her mood in the slightest.

Vernon and Petunia Dursley's minds were blank of anything relating to her new charge.

Literally blank, like something a first year obliviator would leave behind.

It was like there were seriously old-school family blood wards around the boy or something. Since he had been brought in to St. Mungos and exposed to magic, the two non-magical's knowledge of anything related to him had been fading. Just a few hours after the fact when she found out H didn't know his own name she had dispatched an auror to find out what it was from the only possible source just to hear back they genuinely didn't know.

Veritaserum hadn't been able to get anything from the pair or their son. They just no longer knew the boy's name, or even what he looked like. It was clear they meant him harm though, which is why Amelia came back to the idea of the blood wards. Only those had the power to do something like remove knowledge from a mind without physical proximity or evidence of any magical influence.

H must have been a magical orphan, but why in the nine hells had he been left with a family of magic haters? The act of casting wards in that vein had been illegal long before Amelia's own birth, and as the ministry wasn't keen on wards that even they couldn't touch if the situation required, it was one of the law fairly rigorously enforced on both side of the proverbial aisle. Only the _old_ families had access to the kind of blood wards that could do what was before her, but none of those families had reported anyone missing for years. The kid was a metamorph too, and any old family would kill for someone with that kind of power.

H was hers now though. Nothing would hurt that boy again as long as she drew breath, she had promised herself and him. But she needed to get him to Gringotts for an inheritance ritual. They'd find out where he was really from, mores the pity that Goblins refused to work on anyone less than eleven years old.

The wizarding community was a very small world. Amelia, first as an auror, then as head of the DMLE, had met probably most of the population at one point or another. H looked a lot like good old James Potter, back from her squad during the Blood War. The resemblance as of two weeks ago was uncanny, but there were at least three serious reasons why she was discarding it out of hand.

The boy was a metamorph who never had any instruction or recognition of his abilities. He looked kind of like what James would have looked like at that age, but H was at the stage where he was starting to mimic by sight, his features changing slightly when new people entered the room and when he was excited or scared, his hair alone was now 'permanently' a more reddish color which she suspected was based off Susan. On the topic of which, he had been reading a lot of Susie's 'Boy-Who-Lived' books with her, so at this stage the Potter connection was more than likely unrelated.

Then there was the fact that there was no way in the nine hells that the savior of the wizarding world, Harry _Bloody_ Potter, would have been left with a set of abusive good for nothings. Magical or non-magical had nothing to do with it, Amelia often liaised with Her Majesty's government and knew many non-magicals to be fine upstanding folks. That H was left with these monsters was evil enough, heads would literally roll and the people would demand blood, if it turned out their savior had been so abandoned.

Of course, the only thing that _everyone_ knew marked their savior, the scar, was also absent on the boy. When H had gone through that window a lot of glass had ended up in his forehead, so it was tough to tell if he had it in the first place. The thing was, he had enough scars on him to prove he couldn't manipulate that part of his body yet. Even if the lightning bolt scar was there, H probably couldn't separate it from the scars he got from the glass. He couldn't remember having a lightning bolt scar, so he was almost definitely not James' son, but who the devil was he then?

* * *

><p>Time passed far too quickly for H's taste in the Ossuary (what the Bones' called their house, H thought it was clever). Amelia let H loose in her family's library with strict instructions to avoid the section of darker magic texts at the back. He spent a lot of time in there, most of which was interrupted by his new sister coming in and dragging him to the outside world.<p>

For the first month there, he had Dursley flashbacks almost every night. Amelia kept waking up in the morning for work and finding him in the small kitchen off the informal dining room that they typically ate out of, usually with his eyes half closed and with a finished stack of pancakes on a plate next to the stove. She had to admit he was a great cook, but it took her the whole month to get him to not wake up before dawn and start cooking.

Susan spent her time brute forcing H into learning how to fly on the training brooms her aunt left them, and the pair spent a number of hours flying low and slow over the modest grounds surrounding the manor.

H was introduced to Susan's friend Hannah Abbot who lived nearby, and the freshly formed trio spent a lot of time showing their newest member all of the best spots to see a fish or catch a niffler on the grounds (And boy had Amelia been mad when she found them coaxing one into the house with Great Aunt Seraphina's good silver tea set). H found himself more often than not in a tree during a game of hide and seek, or splashing with the girls in a small creek that passed through the edge between the Abbot's land and the Bones'.

During the week Amelia was gone for most of the day and occasionally during the weekend as well. Her job was strenuous, Susan explained, so it left the kids alone with the elves a lot of the time. The elves that the Bones owned were a half dozen of the quietest people H had ever met. They tolerated him making breakfast sometimes, and conversation with them brought the young boy to the conclusion that he had functionally been one of them for a long time. He was quickly fast friends with the group.

Four days a week H spent a few hours with a mind healer in the evening, always under Amelia's watchful eye. The healer (a nice woman named Amanda Octeus) used what she called a small, tightly controlled version of legilimency. She entered his mind (magic still confused the hell out of H, but he was getting used to not understanding) and gently reviewed a lot of the memories from his time with the Dursleys.

It was painful for H, but he had dealt with it all then, and he could do it again. It wasn't like the telly, or like watching a painting, he felt everything all over again as real as it had been the first time. It was a matter of honor for him, he was strong and had paid a lot for that stubbornness. Healer Octeus was keen to make him realize it wasn't his fault, that he didn't deserve what happened to him, and that he could move past it. The trouble was, H knew that. H was aware. What made him who he was, was that he knew he hadn't deserved what he got, but he endured despite it. He knew, and he too it a step further by making himself a lightning rod for the hate in the family so that the others wouldn't be. Healer Octeus didn't seem to know what exactly to make of it, but Amelia seemed pleased for some reason, so H decided he was pleased as well.

The end of H's second month saw the first big change to the routine of play, reading, and healing he, Susan, and Hannah had. Andi (Healer Andromeda Tonks, H had learned at St. Mungos) came over and brought her daughter, Nymphadora 'I-will-stab-you-if-you-use-my-first-name' Tonks.

Nymphadora was an unpredictable and fun person. Her apocalyptic rage at anyone laughing at her name was almost as fun to watch as it was to incite, and she played a mean game of hide and seek.

She was the same age as H, Susan, and Hannah, and she enjoyed their habit of flying around the grounds as much as they did, being familiar with the area already. Before H came into their lives she had been a regular visitor, only stopping so Amelia and Susan could get H acquainted with a normal day-to-day life at the Ossuary. They thought Nymphadora, or Nym as she _very_ grudgingly preferred, might disrupt that life because she was also a shape changer, another metamorphmagus.

Immediately as they met H and Nym validated the reason behind their being separated by dropping everything they were doing and comparing what they could do with their bodies. H had gotten really good at changing his hair. From the first time he had done it in the hospital he had been messing with the power, so he ran through a dozen colors while changing through seven or eight styles from a mohawk to waist length luxurious locks.

Nym showed her competitive streak at his challenge. As they stood in front of their parents, she grew herself an extra thirty centimeters, then shrunk down thirty centimeters from her original height. Rolling up the long sleeves of her robes, she flexed her arm and with a moment's concentration made her bicep muscle visibly expand to double its former size.

H couldn't help his huge grin. He hadn't figured out bones yet, so he couldn't grow like she could, but muscles he could do. Robes were still new to him, so he was wearing a t-shirt and jeans. H flexed like a bodybuilder and grew the muscles all along his shoulders and arms. He even expanded the muscles in his back and chest out until the shirt he was wearing was tight enough to show the defining edges of his changes to his own body.

Susan and Hannah were staring open mouthed, while the adults were chuckling at the display. Nym watched him as he made his latest changes without a second's hesitation, a slightly jealous but thoroughly amused smile on her face.

"You win this time."

A round of laughter later, they added a very familiar fourth to their group.

* * *

><p>Time passed and life continued getting better for the Tonks', the Bones' and the heiress to the Abbot family name. The Abbots were more traditional purebloods and never had been close to the much more progreessive Bones' to their daughter's chagrin.<p>

The kids spent their days playing, and at the almost annoying insistence of H, messing about with magic. For H the library had been his refuge from the horrors of Dudley and the violence of his friends. Susan, Hannah, and Nym complained but allowed it. Andi had taken them aside on a few occasions and asked that they give H a little space and time, if he felt comfortable around books they were instructed to let him do it a bit every day. The girls were hardly going to complain too hard in the face of that.

They celebrated the high holidays of the magical world, and explored the neighborhoods around each of their homes. To their parent's joy, they toured the Ministry and St. Mungos to show H their world. They sat through a wizengamot session, and visited a magical creature preserve. Under Amelia's authority, they even managed a broom tour of the Isle of Drear to see the terrifying and illusive Quintapeds.

Nym and H spent hours and hours competing with each other to change their bodies in more and more impressive ways. Susan and Hannah spent a lot of time in front of the pair. Offering criticisms of various changes and generally playing at being snobby fashion critics. Nym spent a lot of time working on a rather realistic pig nose, while H favored a full sized duck bill (likely because his competition couldn't quite manage it). Daily competition advanced their abilities to an amazing extreme, both of them going to more and more outrageous changes in an effort to get the upper hand.

Amelia was supportive, but the real interest came from Andromeda, who came home one day to find three trouble makers placing her daughter in a giant pot and filling the area around her with soil because she managed to change her feet into a distiurbingly accurate root system.

There was no way to stop the kids, so she felt compelled to ensure they at least would not kill themselves while home and without adult supervision. With that, she delved into centuries of old St. Mungos records for tales and explanations of the abilities and lives of other metamorphs. The four friends (Susan and Hannah both having soaked up a treasure trove of information simply by diffusion from the two shape changers) over H's first year as a Bones became knowledgeable about anatomy for human and other species to an absurd extent. The information they uncovered helped the burgeoning metamorphmagi learn about making safe changes to their biology. Their quest for knowledge (Susan was amused and happy to help her brother, Hannah was considering a career as a healer eventually) even brought them out to the non-magical world.

The friends became a family, and their love and support went a long way to healing some of the wounds H still had from the first nine years of his life.


	4. Chapter 3:Wherein Luck Rears It's Head

Chapter Three: Wherein Luck Rears Its Head

The family's peace, tragically just as every other peace throughout history, was eventually broken, and in following a certain terrible trend it occurred on October 31st, 1990.

All Hallows Eve.

On this day the four kids were with Amelia in the auror department. They had ventured into the territory of the red-robed peacekeepers for what their non-magical counterparts would call a ride-along.

The aurors traditionally did this for a number of firstborn witches and wizards every year, as well as some of the more worldly purebloods. A pair of aurors took a group of kids along on a regular foot patrol around Diagon Alley and explained the intricacies of their jobs to them. Sometimes they even had a 'criminal' from the depths of Knockturn Alley come by and 'steal' a purse so they could give the kids a bit of excitement. The whole operation was something the department ran a few dozen times a year, and was just a normal function.

Today though the stalwart members of the auror corps had an unwitting Harry Potter with them, a fact that naturally would come to complicate their routine.

Senior Auror Kingsley Shacklebolt and Auror Hawkes Hawlish were politely volunteered by their boss to be the aurors on the ride along patrol that day. H, Susan, Hannah, and Nym were the only kids taking the tour that day, and the plan for the patrol was simple.

Shacklebolt and Hawlish were going to lead them down Practic Alley (the section of the wizarding area dedicated entirely to clothes which ran parallel to Diagon), and as they reached the end they would turn onto Form (the section specializing in the bigger and more dangerous creatures), follow it to Diagon Alley proper, then head back to the ministry building. Straightforward, and the work of forty-five minutes, or an hour tops. These kids had seen the purse cutter routine before, so there wouldn't be any bells or whistles on this one. It was all just a favor to Amelia who needed the kids tied up for an hour so she could finish her parchmentwork for the night before everyone headed home to spend the holiday with family.

The patrol started, and H was resigned to amused silence as the three witches went wild over the fashions and dresses for sale all over Practic Alley. The path down the middle of the alley was crowded in on all sides by brilliantly colored fabrics and moving mannequins wearing the creations of a hundred seamstresses. Small charmed lines were tied across the alley far above head height, and fabrics of the richest scarlet, the purest white, and the most brilliant blue hung down from them. There were emeralds that Nym said reminded her of H's eyes, causing H to blush, and there were golds that H compared to Hannah's hair, making her blush.

As the girls chattered excitedly about everything around them, H stood between the aurors, and shared an occasional glance with each of them, as if to say, "Women, am I right?"

Shacklebolt and Hawlish both accepted his looks with massive grins. He had no idea.

They eventually reached the end of the alley, the two aurors not having seen anything of any professional interest but both having noted a few things they would return for in the coming days before Yule. The group made the turn on to Form Alley, and H's eyes lit up.

Form Alley was known in the ministry affectionately as the actual offices of the Department for the Control and Regulation of Magical Creatures. It was the only place on British soil where one could legally buy or trade dragon eggs, and in the right part of the alley one could purchase the services of a sphinx, or even bargain for the protection of a werewolf bodyguard. The alley saw massive amounts of gold and goods exchanged daily, and consequently was only marginally better than Knockturn in terms of the legitimacy of its businesses.

The store fronts were alternately covered in cages, or entirely unmarked, as if anyone who wanted their services would already know exactly what and where they were.

The turn onto the alley was an assault on the senses. Uncleansed or partially cleaned animals and cages filled the air with their unfortunate scents, right alongside the calls of a thousand different owls, hippogriffs, kneazles, and the occasional roar of what sounded a lot like a non-magical lion.

Here the auror pair straightened up and drew their wands from their respective holsters, keeping them in hand but casually hidden inside the large charmed sleeves of their robes. There hadn't been anything untoward reported in the alley for over a month, otherwise they would never had brought children there but in a place like this, and with the department head's only living relative, it paid to be over cautious.

About a quarter of the way down the alley, near where it curved around a tank of grindylow and the crowd of Goblins bidding on them, something changed. It was _very _subtle, hovering just on the edge of the group's perception, but that ten meter stretch was imperceptibly and unmistakably different than all of the alley around it.

The air hung heavier around all of their necks. Before, the amount of kneazle dung being traded was just another unpleasant note in the air, but now it rang sharp and sour in their nostrils. The sun seemed lower, despite the hour, and the alley seemed a long longer than it had a few seconds before. For an instant Hannah clutched a little painfully at Susan's arm, because fort an instant she got the impression that she might never leave. H felt the wrongness in the air acutely, and through a crack in a window saw something he had never seen before, and as he recognized it, he hoped to never see it again. For H it felt suddenly like the years he had spent with his relatives before Amelia had saved him, it haunted him.

He had eye full of unshed tears as he said, "Mr. Shacklebolt, that's not legal, right? Is it sir? Please tell me no." H's voice cracked, and plead with the veteran for the answer he was looking for.

The large dark skinned auror had stopped and held an arm out to stop his partner just a step after H spoke. He had noticed the same feelings they had all felt, and had been close to casting his patronus preemptively, but with the boy's pointing finger he identified the feeling immediately. The number of people in the entire world who had been present to see a phoenix cry in sorrow numbered only in the dozens, and each of them though would say the same thing: it was an experience they would never forget as long as they lived, and more importantly, one they never wanted to repeat.

Kingsley had been present at the end of the war against Grindlewald. He had been only a boy then, having signed up under an assumed name while just a bit too young to actually be enlisted in the magical corps that had gone to challenge the insane dark wizard. He had seen the phoenix Fawkes cry over the broken body of Albus Dumbledore. He knew that noise, muffled as it was.

Shacklebolt murmured, almost below the level the rest of the group could hear at, "No..."

Shacklebolt hurried to the window he glimpsed the horrifying sight through, and the large auror immediately vanished the glass, exposing the revolting darkness of the building to the light.

Inside what appeared to be a dusty and long abandoned basement, a group of five wizards crowded around a runic circle that contained a phoenix. The circle glowed and crackled, throwing black and dark purple flecks of magic into the air around its edges. The phoenix inside the circle was bound to the ground by hideous lashes of magic the same color as the magic surrounding it. Its wings were broken, bending the wrong way and where they connected with the too still body of the bird there was dried and caked blood clinging to the feathers.

The men around it were manipulating glinting crystal vials inside the circle, collecting the tears streaming down the beak of the once proud avian legend. One had his eyes tightly closed and was chanting, while visibly channeling power into the circle that was binding the bird to the ground.

From where the kids and aurors were viewing from the street, a piteous and terrible keening could be heard. Shacklebolt and Hawlish both recognized the signs of a silencing charm that had degraded around the frame of the vanished window.

Shacklebolt closed his eyes and visibly gulped. He put a hand on the shoulder of the man at his side, and jumped through the window to the basement floor to join battle with the monsters who dared to perform such heinous acts on a physical manifestation of the light.

Hawlish roughly grabbed H and Nym who were nearest him and spoke in a quiet but authoritative tone to the kids, "We'll stop this. We have to stop this. But this is dangerous. Someone who could do this to a phoenix," a crash announced that Kingsley had begun his attack, "could do anything. You all stay here, and you stay out of the way, you hear me?"

Hawlish had heard the sounds of battle coming from the window, and couldn't hold back any longer. Without a further glance at the kids still standing dumbfounded at the window on the street, he too jumped down to support his partner.

Five on two are pretty rough odds no matter how you cut it, Kingsley Shacklebolt, or as he was known around the water cooler, Shack, was no slouch though. He was easily qualified to be a master auror, the combat he saw in World War II as well as his years of experience in the Blood War and rounding up criminals since then had honed a killing instinct in the man that few could match. Mad-eye Moody himself could only manage to win six of ten duels against him. Auror Hawlish, known to his friends as Hawk, wasn't nearly as qualified, but knew his business nonetheless. The two men had been partners for half a decade, and in that time had found their rhythm in combat.

Hawlish went defensive, casting angled _protego_s around his partner at roughly sixty degree intervals. Shack's favored style of combat was a very static one, he stood in place deflecting or absorbing spells as needed to give himself the time and focus for longwinded and overpowered curses. His opening salvo of a chain of stunning, binding, and strong piercing spells took out the chanter immediately.

As the chanting dropped and the magic stopped flowing into the binding circle, the other four men took immediate notice and threw up their own shields just before they could be hit by Shack's stronger second burst of spell fire. Hawlish jumped in just in time with his shielding, neatly deflecting the bright yellow and sickly brown of the dark wizards' answering shots.

With the opening gambit played, the battle began in earnest.

Spells flew everywhere around the basement, giving it the brief and terrifying appearance of a laser lightshow. Three supports to the building above them were sliced through by an errant flame whip, Hawlish extinguished it with a muttered counter curse centimeters from Kingsley's knees. An answering _reducto_ from the singed auror knocked a wizard arse over teakettle , and a follow up_ reducto_ got deflected by a comrade back and down, blowing a massive hole in the ground and returning shards of paving stone to sender, cutting three narrow but bloody swathes across Hawlish's left cheek. A lucky return piercer from Hawlish hit one of the phoenix-poachers in the neck, killing him instantly, and sending the three remaining men into a rage.

Shack and Hawlish were pushed away from the standing shields and back almost to the wall they had come in over. Outside H had the three girls lying flat on the ground across the alley and out of sight of the window. He had learned a number of lessons about line of sight and flying objects when Dudley received his first slingshot, and he applied this knowledge to keeping his friends safe.

Back inside the building, Shack was barely holding off the group of wizards as Hawlish frantically cast and recast shields in front of the both of them. Both aurors thought things looked exceptionally bleak, but neither regretted their choice. Dying in defense of one of the noblest forms of life in the world was an excellent way to go, and in fighting the good fight they could each have done a lot worse.

Behind the combat the phoenix that had been tortured to the very edge of its limit returned to consciousness. It had been subject to the darkest rituals, each designed to bind it, force it to cry life giving tears, and to imbue those tears with the same energy that made it nigh-on immortal. The foul magic that had been applied drew energy enough to power three rebirth cycles for every tear, and after hours of being drained it was dying a death it didn't have the power to deny.

A phoenix was a physical manifestation of light, of cleansing fire, of life, of charity, and of good. They healed the sick and ministered to the dying. Their voice could inspire the righteous and condemn the unworthy, and when two men jumped down into a basement filled with hellish magic to recuse one's life, it naturally chose to take some of the last energy it had and funnel it into the best support it could render. A final song from the beak of an immortal bird.

Shacklebolt and Hawlish were near dropping from exhaustion. In order to bind a phoenix you had to be rather gifted magically, and the men they fought showed it. It was taking every ounce of skill both had to fend off the brute force of their foes, but everything changed as the phoenix sang. They each felt the power of the phoenix song wash over them, adding it's power to their own.

The three dark men who had gone so far in their evil as to assault and harm a phoenix collapsed at the sound coming from the bird. To their bodies, each steeped in dark magic, it was worse than the call of a banshee, and was more effective than any _stupefy_. The three lay on the ground, blood flowing freely from their ears, eyes and noses.

Outside H heard the last call of the firebird and, surprisingly, acted. The song was in aid of the poor bird's rescuers, but it was not for them, nor was it against the three who had harmed it so. The song was a message straight to the alert mind that had noticed it's suffering and begun the chain of events leading to its freedom.

H walked as if in a trance to the window, and dropped down to the basement floor. He walked calmly, looking to the world like a man subjected to a _confundus_, passing by Shacklebolt and Hawlish who were engaged in re-stunning and tying up the dark wizards.

H walked to the body of the phoenix, and with unnatural steadiness picked up the phoenix. It was so still. So injured and very much in the last moments of its life, but despite it all it looked like the most beautiful thing in the world. Its feathers glinted like rubies in the half light of the basement, its black eyes still silently singing of strength and glory, even as it let go of its mortal coil.

The phoenix lifted its graceful neck, and nuzzled against H's cheek, it's touch burning away more terror and hurt from the boy's mind and soul. H gently scratched the fine feathers just above its eyes, and with a sigh the phoenix laid an egg in the boy's arms.

The room became warmer. The bloodied face of Hawlish, the sweating face of Shacklebolt, and the curious and slightly shadowed face of H all turned up into wistful grins. Then, as the basement filled with a sense of melancholy and satisfaction so strong it bore down on the three like a physical pressure, there was a great rushing heard as though from a great distance, and the phoenix died.

* * *

><p>Amelia looked at mass of conjured chairs in front of her, and rather unfortunately, at the less useful in comparison people still filling them. Her office had to be hastily expanded as more and more experts poured in from a dozen of the ministry's more <em>exotic<em> (read: pointless) departments. Everyone had an opinion that just _had_ to be heard, and if she didn't have a secret drawer in her desk hidden by a rune powered notice-me-not and filled to the brim with headache and wit-sharpening potions, she probably would have screamed. As it stood she continued to have to pinch the bridge of her nose and apply all the occlumency she knew to stop her anger from rising.

Her aurors, or rather Scrimgeour's aurors (why did she still have trouble making that distinction, she wondered) had reported back to the office over four hours ago. A medi-witch on staff had fixed them up in a moment. Shack got a pepper-up, Hawlish got a pain reliever, a quick _episkey_ and a pepper-up, and the kids all got a bar of chocolate.

It was when her H had to juggle the chocolate with a large ruby red egg that she realized what trouble had started.

The tale came out of the group in front of her slowly, and while short, oh what a tale it was. The depth of the dark magic necessary to actually restrain a phoenix boggled the mind. A group of men evil enough to actually do the thing was beyond belief. The discovery of a dozen liters of stolen and _potent_ phoenix tears went beyond anything she had the tools to deal with. If H hadn't seen the perversion of everything good and decent through that crack in the window, she honestly couldn't bring herself to think of how long that phoenix would have continued to suffer.

It had been over eleven _centuries_ since the last recorded death of a phoenix. Eleven. And one died after giving birth to an egg just four and a half hours ago. In the middle of her jurisdiction. If that weren't enough Ministry sensors were still picking up measurable amounts of the phoenix's song floating around, interfering with the trace network.

Instead of dealing with it she was stuck here having to listen to this group of sorry excuses for wizards all try to get control over the egg, and she had never been closer to using an unforgivable. So far the only people who were making sense to her, and not requesting the egg, were the folks from the Department of Mysteries. Even Lucius Malfoy was standing in the back of her office, with a smug expression on his face, of course, trying to use the Office of the Minister to get a hold of it.

Thankfully, it was all futile. British magical law was built on the bones of the laws set forth by Merlin, who had in turn based his code on the natural magical laws of the druid-stewards who had lived before him, and _they_ had based their traditions on those observed by the earth aspected creatures they worked with, the nymphs, dryads, giants, centaurs, and the like. The point of that chain spanning centuries of legal tradition was that a phoenix's gift could only ever belong to whom it was gifted.

No trades, no take-backs, no passing the buck, and most importantly no 'justifiable confiscation of powerful magical creatures and objects'.

The unspeakables were with her and the law was with her. The only person that could possibly try to overrule her was out of the country ministering over the International Confederation of Wizards, so no one could possibly interfere.

It looked like H was getting a familiar.

* * *

><p>It took some time for the family to adjust and get back to normal.<p>

The kids didn't read the paper (except the Quibbler, which hardly rated) so they missed the media storm around the egg and what had happened. They were kids though, so what they did pick up on was how much the two biggest adult influences in their lives were affected every morning when they read the paper and every evening when they came back from work. By mutual agreement, the called off all serious mischief making while the adults looked so stressed. It wouldn't due to be assigned some kind of real minder during the day, so instead they funneled that energy over into egg care and general research on phoenixes.

Amelia and Andi expected the girls to become little mother hens with the egg, and they expected H to be a little boy about it, that being their somewhat natural states after all. They were surprised to find that H took the responsibility of taking care of the phoenix egg more seriously than even them, only _very_ rarely being seen outside arm's reach of it.

It was hard for them to _not_ know how rare what they had was, a phoenix egg hadn't been seen on _Earth_ for longer than even Griselda Marshbanks had been alive. Madam Marshbanks had actually come by the Ossuary to ask after it the week after the event when they found out that little fact.

A hurried search of ministry archives as well as everything on the open market for information on taking care of a phoenix egg had turned up exactly nothing. H had even gone as far as sending a polite missive off to the esteemed Nicholas Flamel, only to be told that in nearly seven hundred years the old man had never come across care instructions for a phoenix egg, and in fact had only ever seen two. Though he did ask to be told when it hatched and had its first burning day. Amelia's inquiries in the department of mysteries hadn't turned up anything substantial either.

The Bones were worried they'd make a mistake, and H was the most nervous of all of them. He quickly developed a sixth sense for the egg though. Whenever someone got near the small cushion he had put it on to protect it, he was there. Always within reach of the egg, but just far enough away to make it clear that he was trying his ten year old best to not be conspicuous. Nearly two months passed in that manner, with the entire manor doing their level best to _not _step on eggshells, until the 24th of December.

At 19:45 that evening, as H put on his pyjamas and made himself ready for bed and yule the next morning, the egg hatched.

It started with H, pyjama pants on and in the process of adding a flannel shirt to his ensemble, mid-conversation with Susan, Hannah, and Nym. The Tonks were at the Ossuary for the holiday, and Hannah had talked her parents into letting her spend the night.

They were talking about how ridiculous the non-magical idea of St. Nick was (clearly he was a fairy, duh) when H just stopped moving. He stopped so dead still that the girls thought he was messing with them and had actually begun poking him to ensure he was still alive. Then so suddenly no one could react, he was running full tilt through the halls of the manor, the elves shouting at him to be careful as they had just waxed the floors.

Amelia saw him running, and she later swore he was using some form of accidental magic to keep himself on the ground, because he moved like lightning through the house to the cushion next to the fireplace he had placed the egg on that morning.

In retrospect they should have suspected something, that day was the first he let pass without being in constant contact with his ovoid charge.

When he arrived in the room, the girls and adults both hot on his heels, he picked up the egg with love and care, and rolled it directly into the heart of the flames in the fireplace.

Andi and Hannah's faces both drained of blood and in a move that would have been funny in any other situation, identically fainted dead away. Nym walked up and smacked H in the back of the head, as Susan and Amelia both adopted identical expression of utter shock. He hadn't let another person touch the egg in days. It was his, he had said. It was his to take care of and he would do it. He insisted.

Then he had just rolled it straight into the heart of a fire that would cook the egg as surely as if he had cracked it over the large wok he occasionally made breakfast with.

Nym, eyes full of tears, beat her fists uselessly into H's shoulder, "You were taking care of it! How could you, what did you do! How could you?!"

The egg had grown on all of them while they had it. In the two months it had been with them, it was a pretty common sight to see the girls sitting with H reading wizarding stories about phoenixes to the egg. They hadn't named it (H warned off the girls before they could, despite their outspoken desire to do so), but they kept it with them when they had dinner, and H took it to his room when he slept every night.

For his part, H looked like a man possessed, his gaze was off in what could be best described as a thousand yard stare. Without moving his eyes from the heart of the fire, he folded Nym into his arms where she continued to hysterically sob. Behind him Hannah and Andi were still shocked half to death, and Susan and Amelia had disturbingly similar gob-smacked expressions.

Thirty seconds passed, the only sounds being the crackling of the fire and the slowing sobs of a visibly drooping Nymphadora Tonks.

Then, a small trilling filled the room, lightening the mood considerably. H removed his arms from around Nym, and walked around her and to the fire. The fire, which seemed to be the source of the trilling. H stood almost patiently at the edge of the fireplace, letting the melody continue, before leaning over and sticking his face and whole upper body directly into the flames.

Amelia was immediately shocked from her stupor, shouting, "H!" and racing to her son's side.

Her yell of his name became a wordless scream at the apparent suicidal behavior of the boy. In the second it took her to reach the fire though, H stood back up unharmed, revealing a small phoenix in his hands.

The boy wore a smile a mile wide, and hugged the bird to his chest. He walked calmly away from the fire, eyes never moving from the bird cradled in his arms forcing his mum to skid to a halt or run him over.

The tiny flaming avian in H's arms was the purest snow-white. It had flecks of black in its feathers, suspiciously like the coloring of a snowy owl. That wasn't the only difference from what a phoenix was supposed to look like though. All of the literature that the family had been going through agreed, phoenixes were red and gold firebirds, they had black eyes, and golden beaks and claws. The baby bird in H's arms had eyes that were as green as H's own, and its claws and beak were both black as night.

The phoenix in H's arms trilled and cooed, rubbing the boy with its neck.

* * *

><p>In the days that followed, the girls in the house all made their peace with H's actions. Hannah and Andi were quick to forgive, being that they had been functionally unconscious for what Susan, Nym and Amelia all agreed was the worst of it. It also helped that the pair were woken to reality by the first song of a new born phoenix, held lovingly in the arms of a tender and smiling H.<p>

Susan and Amelia were both still angry at H for not saying anything and just walking into fire. H attempted to defend himself, but learned quickly that emotion trumped logic every time. Thankfully for his sanity he applied that lesson immediately by hiding behind an adorable baby animal.

Nym, for her part, refused to address him directly, instead only talking to him through the medium of the newborn bird.

Yule celebrations were, understandably, greatly disturbed by the presence of the phoenix, H's performance also putting a rather large damper on the presentation of presents the next morning. It took him an hour struggling against five passionate and emotional women before he found an outlet for the outpouring of (ugh!) feelings in naming his new friend.

They determined that H's familiar was a lady (thankfully identified by the curvature of the beak and claws), and H insisted that they suggest names to her, letting her best reaction determine her name.

Susan opened with, "Merlin!"

The phoenix looked at her with amusement, and Hannah smacked her arm, "She's a girl dummy!" turning back to the wide eyed bird, "Maeve!"

The phoenix hid its head under its wing, prompting Nym to try, "Morgana!"

She received a glare in return, and the young bird looked to H who was laughing, "Okay guys, I think she wants you to stretch a little deeper than the three most used names in wizard-dom."

Andi had been looking down at the bird thoughtfully, "Danu, or Dana! The celtic mother goddess."

H's familiar tilted its head back and forth, as if weighing the names, then just shook its head.

"Gizmo!" Susan tried, only to recieve a look that asked 'Really?'

She didn't give up, "Sprout." The look didn't change.

"Ook?" This time the baby bird walked over and cuffed Susan's hand with her wing.

"Nikita"

"Naussica"

"Esmerelda"

"Violet"

"Éowyn"

"Nymphadora?" Nym tried, H's phoenix friend actually bit her at that. H laughed out loud at how his familiar was reacting to their attempts, receiving his own smack from Nym for his troubles.

The girls weren't done though, "Fiona!"

"River"

"Jade"

"Empress Anastasia"

H decided to throw in his own bad idea with, "Kid-Killer McGee!"

She bit him considerably harder than Nym at that one.

It went on for over an hour before H decided to put them out of their frustration and misery. Since his hatchling first called to him from the fire he placed her egg in, he had begiun to get a sense of her somewhere in the back of his mind. He did his best to touch that feeling as he idly picked through a history text he had picked from the library while even the adults around the table broke into 19th century Russian literature for inspiration.

Hannah had her head on the table, plainly having given up. Susan looked angry, and Nym had three welts on her fingers from further suggestions so bad that H's little bird felt no other response would work. Amelia and Andi looked amused, but were definitely beginning to show wear.

Finally H finished it.

"Hedwig"

She perked up immediately and with an ineffectual flap, tottered over to her human. A small warble escaped her beak as she rubbed her neck on H's fingers.

Thus was the phoenix named.


	5. Chapter 4: Birds, Family, Necromancy

Chapter Four: Birds, Family, Minor Necromancy

One of the defining aspects of children the world over is how quickly they adapt to new circumstances. They rebound quickly, it's a simple fact of their nature, and perhaps even human nature. We would far too easily, but if we do not die we scar up and move forward. Amelia and Andi took until February to get used to an actual phoenix sitting on H's shoulder. Susan, Hannah, Nym, and H were back to normal by January 10th.

The girls existed in a constant state of suspended disbelief, they were the kids who had grown up in a magical environment after all. H was very slowly getting used to magic, he still had a lot of questions about everything even after just over a year in a magic house, but H also had a rapidly growing mental connection to a physical manifestation of magic, so he muddled through somehow.

Amelia was initially fairly worried about H's ability to responsibly handle a pet, and when she broached the topic of her concerns with the lad, she found herself somewhat less than comforted.

"H, have you ever had a pet before?"

"Well I had a mouse I shared some of my food with and was sorta friends with back when I was in my old cupboard," as he responded his sunny expression clouded over, and the baby Hedwig clumsily fluttered over, her adorable awkwardness in getting to his lap comforting Harry.

Amelia found herself regretting her need to be a good parent, but followed through on the topic anyway.

"Well did you remember to always feed it, and make sure it had a nice clean place to sleep? Things like that?"

"I tried to. I kept pretty good care of it for a long time, until, well..."

"Until what H?"

"Well my cousin stepped on it one day and I think it maybe died, but I'm not sure."

Yep, these were the conversation she didn't really want to have, "I don't like reminding you of this stuff H, but your cousin weighed almost 100 kilos. He would have crushed a grim is he stepped on it, why did you say it maybe died?" Amelia asked with confusion clear in her voice.

"Well the little guy came back to me a couple days later. I was really sad about it for a while, then he showed up again in the little mouse hole he always slept in. He was really cold, and he was issing a lot of fur, but it was him! I think he came to see me again to say good bye, 'cause I never saw him again and there weren't mice around the house anymore after he said good-bye."

H definitely looked troubled at that, like he suspected something had been up, but before any significant brain power could be devoted to pulling that train of thought, Hedwig began nibbling on his fingers for more attention.

Amelia added up all the information she had, and made the executive level decision to stop asking questions there.

Great.

Accidental necromancy.

Of course her adopted son would have done accidental necromancy as a kid. She honestly could not help but recognize the description of what could only be the world's first dormouse inferi. It was like a parent replacing a dying pet with another that looked like the first, but taken to the extreme of an emotional and powerful young wizard stuck alone in a bloody closet. Amelia cursed the Dursleys again, not because it helped anything, but because in moment like this it made her feel better.

The kid's play grew, their games gaining a new level of complexity as a phoenix and her fire traveling became a new dimension to explore. H and Nym , under the careful supervision of Andi, and the not-so-careful but significantly more secret supervision of the others, tried applying all of the research they had done on phoenixes to try and morph into bird-like forms. Susan and Hannah, with Hedwig nestled between them, resumed their commentary and evaluation of the on-going self-transfiguration competition between H and Nym, with the phoenix adding color commentary in the form of songs that seemed to laugh and mock their efforts in equal measure. H did have a bit of an advantage though, feelings he got from Hedwig helped him refine his ability to grow feathers and change his muscles and bone.

Birthdays were celebrated, dinners at the most ancient and noble houses of Bones and Abbot were had, and adventures to London and Harrod's were embarked upon with the Tonks. The family did its best to be in both worlds, the kids thought it was great fun, while Amelia and Andi saw how much of an advantage they would have knowing of both. For Andi it was also a way to keep the kids, and Nym in particular in touch with the memory of her late husband Ted.

Time passed, and before anyone knew it, it was August.

* * *

><p>Age verification spells could nail down a birthdate to plus or minus a month or spo. Perfect accuracy was possible, but it cost a lot of money and required one to interact with the Department of Mysteries Temporal Division, which was a lot like what Amelia understood non-magical dentistry without pain-killers to be like. The ones they had cast on H after finding out that they had no idea when he was born placed his upper limit as August 10th. So on August 10th Amelia took the day off of work and brought all of the kids to Gringotts to see H get an inheritance ritual. The plan was to hit Diagon Alley after and get all of the Hogwarts shopping out of the way in one go.<p>

Despite all of the places they had seen and toured, none of the kids had been inside Gringotts before. Amelia was a very high ranked ministry official, so her visiting Gringotts had to be handled carefully. She was effectively a high ranking member of her government journeying to a foreign and potentially very hostile nation, so naturally the more… excitable… kids needed to be coached on proper responses to the Goblins as well as the basics of gobbledegook. A wrong move during a visit by her had the potential to move into a cross species incident, and she had no desire to start a war especially by proxy through her kids. Ministry regulations their casual racism managed to complicate yet another aspect of her life.

The five humans approached the massive white marble edifice of the bank, phoenix (now grown to what they understood to be roughly teenage-bird proportions) perched quietly on H's shoulder.

Now, to understand Goblin society the first thing one has to acknowledge is that they are a society of warriors and in order to meet with success in any interaction with them, this must be held in the forefront of one's mind. So when entering the stronghold of a potentially hostile group of fighters, the polite thing to do is to declare one's self to the outermost sentries before entering the fortress proper.

Two Goblins in full plate armor stood to either side of the entrance to the bank for this very purpose, both ignored by nearly every wizard as they walked directly by both of them without a second thought. A pair in the finest armor the Goblin nation could produce stood in such a pose twenty-four hours a day, three hundred sixty five days a year, as demanded by Gringott's martial pride and by treaty.

Amelia and the kids walked up the sentries, H shifted Hedwig to his arm, and they all delivered bows of respect to an unknown party, one of the four bows supplied by Amelia's formal ministry training. The Goblins looked on, brutally suppressing the surprise that any human magicals, or perhaps British human magicals, would pay them respect.

Amelia began formally, "Master Goblins, I am Amelia Bones, head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement. I would like to check the accounts of the children with me, and to arrange for an inheritance ritual for the boy beside me," H bowed again, filled with uncertainty and nervousness in the face of a Goblin armed with an axe so sharp he couldn't help but be consumed by the suddenly important concern of whether or not he could regrow a limb, "I am with Susan Bones, Nymphadora Tonks, Hannah Abbot, and my adopted son H Bones."

The two Goblins looked at one another. Formal acknowledgment of entry was the most breached portion of the current treaties, most officials with the British government were too stupid or arrogant to actually abide by their solemnly sworn agreements to this behavior. It went without saying that the human's bows indicated the wrong action tense and in fact invited the guards to sniff them and reject their entry if them seemed unwashed. The point was instead that the list of ministry representatives that abided by the treaty now expanded to include this woman's young, nearly doubling the size of the list.

The phoenix hardly hurt their case as well.

The Goblin to the left of the entrance spoke with a voice that invoked gravel sliding down a hill, "Enter, witch, and seek the office of Master Rel in the hall to the immediate right of the entrance. He will meet your needs."

The five all responded with "Thank you master Goblin" in gobbledegook, Amelia out of genuine thanks, a ministry employee having not received such a straight answer in nearly four decades, and the children because she had drilled the response into them.

Another unreadable look passed between the sentries as the quintet finally entered the building.

As the kids entered four gasps, and a squawk that H would later tease his familiar about, sounded in the busy hall. The ceiling stood ten meters above them, polished to a fine sheen and composed of what looked like marble streaked with onyx. The walls and floor were of the same material, bringing a sense of sophistication and nobility to the room. Down the hall stood more than fifty desks, each manned (Goblined? H wondered) by a pair of Goblins who were dealing with a wizard, weighing gems, appraising objects, checking keys, and observing formal contract signings. The group moved per the guard's instruction, down a hall that was streaked with gold in addition to marble and onyx. Halfway down the hall they found a door labeled Rel at which they knocked at once, then immediately entered.

Part of what Amelia coached into the kids was that Goblins valued time as much as money, because time was frequently literally money to them. They reportedly had hundreds of Goblins working round the clock computing interest, taxes, and penalties to ensure every count was accurate to the minute.

The Goblin at the solitary desk in the center of the room looked up at their entrance, prompting Amelia to ask, "Master Rel?"

"Please present the keys for the vaults of Ms. Susan Bones, Ms. Abbot, and Ms. Tonks. Ms. Amelia Bones, please present your wand for magical signature verification. Mr. Bones, please step to your left and take a seat."

The kids were all suitably impressed and amelia's instruction was immediately verified, Goblins indeed did not waste time. The girls were led off to their vaults by a series of Goblins once their keys passed muster. Amelia had a wallet linked to her vault and so did not need a visit, she was, however, required to verify her identity to both request and authorize an inheritance test.

The Goblin opened a drawer, and produced a small slab of gold with three circles bound in runes that seemed to draw the eye in and twist one's perspective the longer one looked. H was deep in such a twisting stare when Master Goblin Rel spoke again, causing him to jump.

"Mr. Bones. Please give me one of your hairs, and a drop of your blood. Cut the hair off using this knife," Rel opened another drawer and removed a dagger that had more jewels on it than H had ever seen in his life, "and please make a small cut on the pointer finger of your dominant hand to produce the drop of blood."

H looked very nervous.

H, in a strange coincidence, felt very nervous.

Amelia put a hand on his unoccupied shoulder, and from the other shoulder Hedwig released a melodious chirp in support. Unnoticed by both preoccupied humans, the Goblin closed his eyes at the sound, his expression softening just a hair. There was a reason phoenixes were revered by Goblin kind.

One hair lengthening and two short cuts later, the ritual was nearly begun. Rel took the dagger from H, H's blood still on it, and cut his own long finger with the portion still covered in human blood. The resulting mix was dripped into the final circle on the gold tablet. Master Rel spoke the ritual words in gobbledegook, and before the three beings the gold tablet flattened, lengthened, and became a set of parchments.

"You both entered our halls today intending to complete this ritual. You have not yet seen the results, and now is precisely the final moment you can back away from this. You have shown myself and my kin respect today, and so it is returned. It is possible that you will not like the results of this sheet, in the past many who have undergone this same test have not. Are you both certain you want to continue?"

H looked at Amelia. He wasn't certain. He had only recently become comfortable calling her mum. She had saved him from his old family. She promised him he wouldn't be hurt like that again, she promised she would protect him, and she was the first adult to not have lied to him. What would she do if he turned out to be someone bad? What if he was a Malfoy? What if he was related to one of the men who had killed Hedwig's mother?

Hedwig pressed her cheek to his, wild emotion leaked clearly across their connection, and tried to offer comfort. Amelia to his other side had her own reservations. She had never expressed to H her suspicions that he was from one of the old families. She had told H that he should know who he was, and she had told him that he could have a history and he deserved to know it. Then in the moment she looked at his face and saw his uncertainty. Her hand hadn't left his shoulder, so she gave a squeeze.

"No matter what happens, H, you're still my son. You're still Susan's brother. You still have us, and we won't let you go."

That was what H needed to hear, "We want to see the results, Master Goblin. Thank you for your patience and your help."

Rel looked approvingly on the wizards in front of him, before handing the pair the top copy of the ritual results and taking the bottom copy for himself.

In a manner that would have shamed a dozen generations of his ancestors, Rel was the first to react with a whispered, "Damn."

The top of the page was lined with a header of more mind-bending Goblin runes, which distracted H's eye for a moment before he could break his attention away and look to the first proper line of the parchment, the line that contained his name.

Harry James Potter.

_Well how about that,_ he thought, _starts with an H and everything, I got pretty close given I only ever saw it once and—_

Harry James Potter.

Harry found himself agreeing wholeheartedly with the Goblin. Damn.

Under his name, written in the same meticulous hand as his name above it, was a family tree that had his mum also agreeing with the good Master Rel.

"_Damn._"

A line traced Harry's direct ancestry through four hundred years of uninterrupted Potter to the family that begat them, the Peverells. From there the line continued across a veritable who's-who of some of history's most notable witches and wizards until it dead-ended at the coupling of no less noble persons than godric Gryffindor and Helga Hufflepuff themselves.

There were notes below the tree, covering both how records could not extend further back than the formation of the ruling clan, something which occurred shortly after the founding of Hogwarts. Harry's eyes scanned robotically, just to give his brain something to do while it stuttered and stopped it's way to coming to grips with the information it had just received.

On automatic Harry flipped the page to the next one, a sheet of parchment with the auspicious title 'Assets, Pecuniary', the total of which, at the bottom of the page, caused his eyes to bug out. Seeking relief from the madness, he flipped to the next parchment, 'Assets, Demense' at which point the tiny men in his brain that ran around filing papers and pulling lever all simply gave up.

It was too much. All of it.

Harry was _the_ heir, as he was the only descendant of the line of first sons going back to Godric and Helga themselves.

Amelia and the newly named Harry met each other's eyes.

"Mum... I... I'm Harry Potter? So my parents are dead, and from Voldemort? And... what?"

The coldly analytical part of her mind noted that H – Harry, that Harry listened to her lecture and had not questioned the honesty of the test, which would have been a considerable faux-pas. Given that Rel was paging through the parchment looking just as astounded as they each felt it probably would have been forgiven, but better safe than sorry.

"Come here Ha... Harry. Come here kiddo."

Harry rushed to leave his seat and get into the arms of his mum. Hedwig saw the move coming , so she stepped dexterously from Harry's shoulder to the back of his chair, crooning a low and stable note to fortify the whole room.

* * *

><p>Rel was no less overwhelmed than the mother and child in front of him. This was a confluence of events beyond his understanding, and he knew it.<p>

For these accounts, Ragnuk himself needed to be involved. Not in the least because his ancestor's sword stood a solid chance of being reclaimed here and now from a wizard who showed respect to Goblins. This was going to be a very long, but very profitable day. The interest off the accounts alone, with his half percent personal stake, would be enough to fund his mate and their young for the next few centuries.


	6. Chapter 5: The Power of a Name

Chapter Five: The Power of a Name

* * *

><p>"How many pounds are in 2000 galleons?" … "This went to the <em>Dursleys<em>!?"

* * *

><p>"What is compound interest anyway, and why should a thousand years of it matter?"<p>

* * *

><p>"Of course you can have your sword back! I'm sorry my ancestor took it from yours. It's an awesome sword, I completely understand why you would want it back, please take it. I guess… is there anyway I can leave my family something even half that nice without stealing from you all?"<p>

* * *

><p>"My parents had a will? Can I see it?"<p>

...

"Who are Sirius Black and Remus Lupin? Or this Pettigrew guy? Hey mum! You're on here!"

…

"I wasn't supposed to ever even meet my – those relatives."

* * *

><p>"Mum, you were engaged, and to Sirius Black!"<p>

* * *

><p>Nym and Hannah both left shortly after they got money from their vaults, with Andi taking an impromptu personal day from St. Mungos to provide an escort. They ended up having to ditch the Bones in Gringotts, as what should have been a pleasant afternoon of personal discovery turned into an exploration of the personal effects and familial history of two Hogwarts founders.<p>

Susan chose to stay with her mum and brother for support, and Harry could have kissed her for how much he appreciated it. He needed a steadying hand. None of the Bones got any shopping done, though they had half a month or so before the shopping became vital, so it was alright.

Harry led his mum and sister through a pair of vaults that hadn't been opened in near on a millennia, and shortly thereafter through a vault from the ancient family his had descended from. After picking through piles of journals, deeds, old dented armor sets, and wands, Harry finally got to the vault that he really wanted to see, that of his birth parents.

Harry decided that he may be a Potter, but Amelia had saved him. More than that, she and Susan had given him a true home and, well, love for the first time in his life. He may technically be a Potter, but he was Harry Bones, and nothing could change that.

That said, he nearly fell to his knees at the sight of a wizarding photo of his parents on their wedding day. It was one of the first things in the Potter vault, set in a photo album propped open on a chest in front of the door. It looked like James and Lily, Harry liked the feel of those names on his tongue, hadn't ever gotten around to putting away their wedding things. Harry had been immediately confronted by his parents exchanging vows, right across from his parent's first dance as a married couple. Lily's wedding dress was just laid across a chest to the side of the vault door, like she had been there just a few minutes ago and would be right back to properly put it away.

When they finally made it back to the Ossuary, Harry wore three signet rings for three noble houses thought long lost, and a Potter heir apparent ring. Susan, Amelia, and he also had plans to free their uncle, fiancé, and godfather, respectively, with evidence to back up their plan.

They had come for a family name and gotten a hell of a lot more than they had bargained for.

* * *

><p>Amelia was watching Harry, her son with his third name in less than two years, as he excitedly ran through Flourish and Blotts. She was letting Harry spend a few hundred extra galleons on his things for Hogwarts, and he was using it to buy a number of books he had his eye on since he had been introduced to magic. She had no idea what this 'Burning Man' thing was, or why the shamanic magic from it interested him so much, but the book cost thirty galleons by itself. It wasn't like the pint sized merlin couldn't afford it.<p>

Harry was bringing the texts, journals, and research notes of both of his parents along with him to Hogwarts. He had wanted them so he could have a connection to his birth parents, Amelia had insisted he take them because his parents had been verifiable prodigies and with their notes he could go far. He also was bringing the freshly minted Potter blade, forged by the king of the Goblin clans of the British Isles for him personally, along with the personal journals and research notes from most of his legendary forebears.

In the weeks to come and unbeknownst to the adults, he had also reclaimed the stolen possessions of the Peverell brothers using a piece of family magic he had found in their vault. Harry possessed the invisibility cloak of death herself, and was master of the resurrection stone. The brother's journals talked about the items, the Deathly Hallows, allegedly given to man by death. Harry couldn't reclaim the wand outside of a duel, but the cloak could be summoned at the command of it's master, as could the stone. When it appeared he found the stone to be attached to a ring enchanted with something that felt awful to even be near, and far too heinous to even think about touching. For a nominal fee, the Goblins had agreed to discreetly take care of any enchantments on the ring and return the stone to him by Yule. Harry actually had to talk them into the fee, evidently high-end clients were evidently afforded a different level of banking service, something which included the odd 'no questions asked secret buried in an unmarked vault' service. That one scared him a little.

For all of the extra books he was bringing, Harry needed to buy himself a big trunk. Big verging on ridiculous. So he insisted on buying Susan, Hannah, and Nym greatly expanded trunks in addition to his own, as well as permanently feather-weight bags for their books. He could afford it, so Amelia felt no great guilt. Truth be told, Harry could probably buy a small island and not really notice the expense, and he got an amazing deal buying in bulk.

The Goblins were still working out the deed situation, and if Master Rel was to be believed, they had a team of five working solely on who owed her son exactly what in terms of past due rent.

Before any of them really knew it, the group had assembled all of its necessaries. Nym and Hannah had gone with the group back to Diagon, each finding themselves incapable of missing a second shopping trip. The only thing left for Harry and Susan was their wands. Amelia had put it off for last both because she felt it was a rite of passage, and because after twenty years she still found Ollivander to be very creepy.

The two pre-teens made their way into the store, Amelia a short distance behind, and when the three fully entered the shop, a creaking voice behind them spoke up, "Ah, Miss and Master Bones, or would you prefer your hyphenated title, young lord?"

All three jumped as Ollivander appeared from behind them, and glided his way to the counter.

"My hyphenated title, sir?" Harry asked, when he got his voice back.

Ollivander was idly perusing his shelves, lazily running a finger over the ends of different boxes, as he answered in an idle tone, "Yes, something tells me that saying Lord Gryffindor-Hufflepuff-Peverell-Potter-Bones would get old somewhat quickly. Forgive me if I am being presumptuous, but unless you feel strongly on the matter I believe I will simply stick to calling you Harry."

The strange old man had gathered a number of boxes from the back of his shop at that point, laying them all on the counter by the time Harry nervously gave his assent.

"If you'll forgive me again, Harry, something tells me it may be better to get your esteemed sister matched up before we tackle you," the creepy old man turned his white, almost sightless eyes to Susan, "Miss Bones, Susan, if I may, please present your wand hand."

In a flash the aged wandmaker passed a half dozen wands across her palm, before settling on a short and dark wand, "Please give this a swish, miss. Unless I miss my guess, nine and one quarter inches, darkened ash, with unicorn tail hair should serve..."

Ollivander trailed off as Susan swished her wand, releasing a bright stream of sparks.

"Yes. Excellent." Ollivander smiled, "Now for you, Harry. The wand-maker in me says that this may take a while, so," with a series of flicks from a random wand from the pile, two comfy armchairs appeared behind Harry for his family, and Ollivander began replacing boxes on his shelves and pulling new ones.

A twelve and three-quarters inch beech wood with dragon heartstring caused wings to grow on a trio of other boxes near the front, making them literally fly from the shelves.

A thirteen inch oak wand with a core from a particularly nasty unicorn caught fire as it touched his hand, only to be removed and placed in a jar filled with what looked like clear glue.

Ten inches, driftwood, and a core of crushed basilisk irises touched his hand and blew a hole into the wall across the shop from Harry.

The pattern repeated itself over thirty times, at which point Amelia and Susan were sitting in their chair munching amusedly on popcorn. Harry's clothes were smoking in several places, and smoldering in several more. His hand was bandaged where two separate wands had simply exploded at his touch. Harry was currently missing both eyebrows, and had holes in his robes where a few wands had jumped after having been set ablaze.

The shop looked like a war zone. Two shelves were just missing, having been accidentally vanished. Jars of the clear glue which Ollivander had identified as a fixative agent were everywhere, most containing the fragments of wands that had reacted less than pleasantly to Harry's touch.

Embedded in the ceiling was an eleven inch holly wand with a phoenix feather core. It had been the last wand Ollivander had tried, after much muttering. He had been increasingly exited the more wands Harry tried, but as soon as the last one rejected Harry by rather forcibly flying from his hand and boring a hole in the ceiling, Ollivander's eyes lost a good portion of their zeal, and he walked to the back of his shop while muttering what sounded like a series of welsh curses that questioned the parentage of a few of his works. Amelia was in stitches behind him, evidently having been able to understand the murmured words of the crazed wandmaker.

Before long Ollivander could again be seen picking his way through the wreckage of his shop, carefully avoiding a puddle of bright blue liquid that had spilled and was now gently smoking, reverently holding a wand in both hands.

"This, Harry, is the last wand I have in this shop that could possibly match you. Before you take hold, I must first tell you it's story. This wand was commissioned just shy of a thousand years ago, built by my late great-grandfather, his last creation before he left these shores for the depths of the Brazilian jungle on a final ingredient hunting mission. The wand was commissioned for a man now known as Uric the Oddball," Amelia and Susan both gave a snort to which Ollivander responded with a glare, "Uric the Oddball, then known as Uric Delacroix, was in truth not as history remembers him. The man history has remembered was a man crushed and driven quite mad by the untimely deaths of his wife and unborn daughter. Before he began recreational badger corpse handling and the usage of cephalopods as headwear, Uric was one of the world's most feared hit wizards and duelists. He had this wand commissioned scant weeks before the inn he resided at with his wife collapsed, claiming her life. Eight inches, made of sweet wormwood taken from a particularly massive specimen, with a core of the collected feathers of a dozen augurey Uric coaxed into the shop.

The ladies present had sobered considerably during the minor history lesson. Amelia though had not stopped munching on the popcorn she had conjured.

With what was now a significant amount of caution, Ollivander cast a shield around himself and the remainder of his intact wares (Amelia having done the same for both her and Susan), and he gingerly handed the wand to Harry.

As soon as it touched his skin Harry's hand closed reflexively around it. Like the waves from a stone dropped into a pond, a frisson of energy and sensation covered Harry's body.

There was a rising sound of bird cry, first only one voice, then two, then a chorus. Harry looked around the store wildly at the sound, but no one else seemed to be reacting to the noise. The voices formed a deep and terrifying harmony, a sound that felt like it was burying itself in his brain, similar but opposite from how he felt Hedwig. When the noise reached as deep into his head as it seemed to be able to go they broke off their dark song and called out one final time, this one sound leaking out of his head and into the real audible world around him.

"Curious things, Auguries. It was believed that their cries heralded death, though we know now they precede merely rain. Still, the belief persists young Harry, the belief persists…"

* * *

><p>Amelia had taken the three weeks before the kids left for Hogwarts off of work, so she was strongly looking forward to September second, when she could formally look up the charges surrounding one Sirius Black, and bring into evidence the last will and testament of the Potters.<p>

She was greatly surprised by how well Harry was handling everything. The kid had an indomitable will, and between her, Susan, and Hedwig, he handled yet another world shaking event with relative aplomb.

Just as much as she was looking forward to seeing her Sirius again, she was also looking forward to putting an auror on the case of what the hell actually happened to Harry. He lost his parents in defense of the entire wizarding world, the least they could do was ensure he had a decent childhood. The trail was now very cold, but self-updating records were one of an investigative auror's greatest assets, and she was now dead certain that their records surrounding October 31st 1981 needed a second or third look.

She was grateful for it, but no part of how he had become a Bones should have been allowed to come to pass in the first place, even if she was very glad it all had ended as it did. All of the wills, record systems, and bureaucracy that were made to protect kids shouldn't have failed even half as easily as it had for Harry.

A lot of questions needed answering.


	7. Chapter 6: To Hogwarts!

Chapter Six: To Hogwarts!

The brilliant, and mildly eye watering, crimson of the Hogwarts Express temporarily blinded Harry as he and his family entered platform nine and three-quarters.

For the purposes of the train ride Harry had agreed with Amelia's reasoning and now wore brilliantly red shoulder length hair and significantly toned down green eyes alongside a few other minor facial changes. Amelia convinced him that his normal form looked a lot like a young James Potter, and while she had had been uncertain of his identity for a few years, people expected Harry Potter to be here and so would correctly put two and two together.

He would reveal himself at the sorting (which Amelia still refused to describe to them!), but until then he was going to ignore his real identity. She and Andi had impressed on Harry how much people would want to know him and want something from him. This way, anyone they met on the train who wanted to be friends would want to be friends with him and not with the Boy-Who-Lived. Harry had read enough of the books describing his own supposed life to have an idea what he was in for.

Once properly inside, Amelia had directed them to the front of the train. It seemed the head boy and girl always reserved the front car for the prefect meeting and as a base for prefects on patrol. The closer they were to it, the less likely they would be to run into any trouble from angry teens playing with wands again after a summer off.

The kids put their things in a compartment and Harry locked the door behind them with a firm _colloportus_, then the four went out to say good-bye to their folks.

Hannah shared an oddly formal parting with her family, while Amelia and Andi shared a rather intense group hug with Susan, Nym and Harry. Susan and Nym had never really been away from home before, and Harry was dealing with a significant identity change on top of never having had something he thought of as home before. They all knew they would each miss the hell out of each other, and inside of a week Amelia half-suspected that she would get Poppy Pomfrey on the floo requesting that she comfort a home sick kid.

While they shared their good-bye, a red-headed crowd from outside the platform came in and with much shouting, hugging and wringing of hands, made their way onto the train. A loud and deep bell sounded around the platform nearly as they entered, indicating the train would be heading out in ten minutes. Amelia and Andi reluctantly released their children to a waiting Hannah, and the groups departed.

After a short wait, the train began to move, and from their spots near the windows Harry and Susan watched the red-heads move their kids on to the slowly speeding up train. The two that looked like twins promised what sounded like a toilet seat to the only child remaining on the platform, and in a moment, the train had finally left Kings Cross for pastures cleverly illusioned to be greener.

The kids started to amuse themselves by opening Lily Potter's notebooks and setting them next to their charms text and trying out some of the first spells they would be learning in their classes. It was a routine they had repeated a dozen times since Harry's first mind bending visit to Gringotts, and perhaps it was his unquenchable enthusiasm for it, but Harry was showing a surprising aptitude for the art. Tracing his finger over the lines written by his biological mother, Harry followed her advice to the letter and over the course of the first hour or so of the train ride successfully cast each of their first year's charms. The family had gotten up to levitation spells when their first interruption arrived at the door.

A small member of the loud red-headed clan knocked on their door at two hours in, after visibly examining everyone in the compartment he began, "Hey, have any of you heard where Harry Potter is sitting? My mum told me to sit with him."

Everyone looked at Harry, who sighed at the group's lack of subtlety and obvious vote for him to be the spokesperson, "No idea mate, good luck finding him. Any idea why your mum told you to sit with him?"

As he closed the door, the red head who hadn't bothered to introduce himself replied, "Apparently Dumbledore told her to."

Harry looked around the compartment at that, Susan and Hannah shared looks of confusion and Nym looked angry.

"Interesting."

The spunky metamorph immediately responded, "Troubling, I think."

Susan and Hannah looked sad as they nodded in agreement, Nym looked actively angry which mirrored how Harry felt on the inside. A cursory glance at the Potter will showed that it had been sealed by Dumbledore at his parent's death, and no one had known what to think.

They resumed their work, moving slowly from Lily to James and from charms to transfiguration, working their way as best they could through the syllabus. Amelia had given them all copies of her own notes from school, but when she gave them to the family she had freely admitted Harry's biological family just had a flair for magic she hadn't ever been able to match, "They were Head Boy and Girl for a good reason, especially James. He never made prefect but still found his way to the top spot, and we always thought the strength of his magic was a big part of why."

An hour later, the second interruption came in the form of a head full of bushy brown hair and a boy hiding squarely in it's shadow.

"HelloI'mHermioneGrangerandthisisNeville, haveanyofyouseen-"

Her words came out fast, all flying from her mouth in rapid fire but somehow each not tripping over any other. It was odd, certainly an efficient, if impractical method of communication, but the speed with which she spoke was not what caught the compartment's attention. Her tone was so terribly, horribly, maddeningly _resigned_. Like she was so used to not finishing her thought and expected to be immediately told to bugger off that she was determined to get her thought out, and to hell with anything else. It was a strategy that spoke of bitter experience, and given how they were seated on one extreme end of the train, Harry figured it was entirely possible.

In this case, the girl with the bushy hair was the one to interrupt herself, as Hannah's look of intense concentration and eventual transfiguration of a cauldron cake into an actual (if tiny) cauldron caused her to sputter to a stop and gaze excitedly on the small orange and pumpkin scented cauldron in Susan's hand.

"Ooh! Are you trying magic! I've tried a number of the spells from our textbooks and I haven't had much trouble, but I've never done anything that big. Its transfiguration, isn't it? I kept getting stuck on the teacup into teapot, I think because of the size difference."

There was a moment of confused silence as the four friends took a moment to process the torrent of words from the girl, as well as the appearance of the boy at her side.

Harry started, remembering the girl's name from her entrance, "Hullo Hermione, I'm Harry Bones, this is my sister Susan, and our friends Hannah Abbot and Nymphadora," who began growling, " 'I-Will-stab-You-If-You-Use-My-First-Name' Tonks. Useful side note: she actually did stab me once, even if it was only with a particularly sharp spoon, so be careful. Otherwise, nice to meet you!"

Harry turned a supportive smile to the kid who was so painfully shy he seemed to be still trying to hide behind Hermione, trying to gently prompt him to introduce himself. It took a small awkward moment but eventually it worked.

"I-I'm Neville L-Longbottom."

Harry perked up instantly, and all of the girls around him twitched.

"Neville Longbottom," Harry said quickly, "Son of Frank and Alice Longbottom?"

Harry looked keenly at the boy sitting across from him, before standing and going to the door of their compartment. The room behind him was silent as he poked his head into the corridor, looked about, and then closed their compartment, latching the door's lock as he sat down again.

Arranging himself briefly for the unfamiliar in his audience, Harry sat still for a moment and closed his eyes. As Hermione and Neville looked on the red seemed to drain from his hair, leaving behind a slightly more auspicious head of unkempt black hair. His chin narrowed slightly, his nose tweaked slightly, as though it had once been broken, and when his eye repoened they gleamed killing curse green.

"So I told you a second ago that my name is Harry Bones, and it is! I mean that is totally, completely, and legally true. It's just that I was born with a different name, my biological parents named me Harry Potter."

Neville's eyes widened, _the_ Harry Potter! The new face in the room certainly looked the part, Hermione beside him was positively buzzing with unasked questions, but the hands she had clasped over her mouth seemed to indicate that she wanted to see this play out.

Harry scratched the back of his head, looking out the window briefly, "I only found out who I was like two weeks ago. I had… kind of a hard time growing up. I was really short of real family."

HE went silent for a moment, his silence filling the room, then he looked to Neville, "I've been looking for you since I found out who I was, because one of the first things I found was that your mum was named my godmother when I was born, and my mum was named your godmother. Our parents were really close, and when my parents died I was supposed to go to her and your family, to live with you."

Harry's story seemed to lend steel to Neville's spine as he went on, and as Harry wound down Neville sat forward, "I-I, you… well you probabaly know the story. After my parents went to S-Saint Mungo's I've lived with my Grandmother. W-We don't go out much."

There was a heavy silence in the compartment as Neville and Harry both confronted what they could have had if anything had been even just a little different, the weight of the moment kept the audience from interrupting.

"Voldemort, eh?," Harry said, a weak grin on his face, "What a bastard."

Neville cringed for an instant at the hated name, but couldn't suppress his dark chuckle at the sentiment. Harry smiled widely at the sound, and the tension in the compartment eased.

The day after the Bones got back from Gringotts Nym remarked to her new old friend Harry that his life was more fun than the stories her mom listened to on the Wizarding Wireless Network. She told him not only did his new name suit him, but she liked him before he turned out to be Harry Potter, which was not unlike the plot of the last drama Andi had made her sit through. Now she was sitting on the Hogwarts Express, avidly watching the drama unfolding on the bench across from here, munching on conjured popcorn (she silently sent thanks to Amelia who had painstakingly taught her the spell) with Hannah and Susan, both of whom had agreed with her assessment a little over two weeks ago.

Harry tentatively offered his hand across the aisle, and Neville turned the shake into an awkward hug bridging the gap. Hermione moved over to the bench now shared by the other girls and leaned over to whisper, "Is it always like this in the wizarding world? It's only my first day and I think I've accidentally re-united a family."

Nym scooted over to give her a bit more room, and offered her the bowl of popcorn, "Not the whole world, though in our experience, it is what life is like with Harry."

Hermione politely accepted and began munching with the other girls, "Cool."

It took half an hour, but Harry eventually was able to pay attention to something other than his new friend. Hermione was introduced to the whole group properly, and the onslaught of her questions devolved everything into a discussion of the magical world and magic in general.

Harry who was, all told, still fairly new to the magical world served as a translator of sorts for Hermione. They had a fantastic time blowing the bushy haired girl's mind by showing her the age old wizarding game of exploding snap. She seemed to think it was worse than the mundane version because at least not paying attention to one's cards in the normal version didn't get one singed, though her complaints were quickly ignored.

The third and thankfully final interruption to their journey came in the form of a skinny, platinum blonde haired boy followed by two others whose body hair and ridiculous size made them look startlingly like gorillas. The door to their compartment was still magically locked, so the three interlopers on the other side of the frosted glass just knocked on the window to the compartment loudly and imperiously.

"Ah shite," Neville said, only to be glared at by Hermione, "Sorry, I meant 'oh poo', anyway, that's Draco Malfoy. He's one of the big pureblood supremacy fanatics."

Hermione shot Harry a confused glance, and he added, "Think those National Front lunatics, but instead of anyone not white, its anyone with non-magical relatives. They call you guys muggleborn if they're feeling nice and mudbloods if they're feeling mean. Their word for non-magicals is muggles."

"Oh. Gross."

A voice both annoyed and annoying called in from the outside, "Oi! Open up!"

Harry elbowed Nym and turned to Neville, "Nev! Tell us what he looks like!"

It took the two metamorphs about four minutes to get close enough to Draco's form for Neville to approve. The fact that the two minutes were filled with exclamations of 'I can hear you in there!' and 'If you don't open up, my father will hear about this!' almost made the pair slowdown in their efforts.

When they finished they gave everyone else a moment to get back into their seats, before Harry cancelled his spell and they let the young Malfoy open the door. Harry started the festivities.

"I say, _our_ father will hear of your rudeness. Trying to get into our compartment! The indignity of it!"

"Indeed, I can hardly believe the audacity of this man!" Nym continued in an over-the-top pompous accent.

"What do you two think you're playing at! I'm Draco Malfoy, no one mocks House Malfoy in this manner! My father will hear of this attack on the honor of my house!"

Harry and Nym both had trouble keeping straight faces, but each had significant experience controlling their features and were doing better than the rest of their compartment. Hermione was burying her face in Hannah's shoulder. Hannah and Susan each looked an instant away from bursting out into laughter that would kill lesser people, and Neville, having had training from his grandmother in comportment and bearing, was merely bright red in the face with a smile a kilometer across.

Harry pushed it a bit farther, "Not before our father hears of your assault on the dignity of the house! Dressing in third hand robes like that, honestly! We may just begin writing him now! Especially since you seem to have two micro-trolls trailing you. As if any self-respecting Malfoy would allow that!"

Nym, for her part, stood and opened her trunk, evidently looking around for parchment. In reality she needed to look away so she could actually smile, but when she met the eyes of her audience, she came a millimeter from losing it. Seeing how close she was to losing it, and how close everyone else was, she decided to end it.

"We are simply done with you, you stain on House Malfoy's honor. You and your no doubt sullied lineage will hear from our father soon!"

With that she slammed the door closed, and Harry shot off another _colloportus_ as well as a _silencio. _Just in time, it turned out, as the entire group fell apart in laughter.

* * *

><p>The remaining few hours of the journey passed with no more distractions, but no less laughter. The sight of Malfoy, who had accosted Neville in his search for his toad, gawking at two copies of himself who parroted his own annoying attitude right back at him was something no one in the group would soon forget.<p>

The case of the missing toad had reared its head, somewhat guiltily, soon after Malfoy departed. However one of the first spells that Amelia and Andi both had taught the kids upon their receiving wands was the summoning charm. The spell was considered fourth year, but it was almost like everything about it was tailored to be the first thing you would teach a child. The intent and emotion behind the summoning charm was all about 'Come here!' and 'Gimme!', something you would be hard pressed to find a child that didn't understand. Lily Potter's journals contained what seemed like a dissertation on the topic.

Her journal had chapters dedicated to this line of thought, something she felt made charms one of the simplest branches of magic. The journal contended that charms were simple because the intents associated with them were simple. It was why charms were some of the most widely used magic. The willpower component in the locking charm was _LOCK_ or if it had to be reduced down to a simpler idea, _NO MOVEMENT_. Silencing charms (typically fifth year spell work) were simpler still, _QUIET_. The summoning charm was a little more complicated, depending on how you thought of it. When most people used it they were careful to have their summoned object not impact anything on its way to them, that made the intent _COME HERE, DON'T HIT THINGS. _A more general usage in open ground was an easier _COME HERE_, which was why it was widely considered easier to summon things over open ground or not around corners.

Harry used a simple _Accio Trevor_ to get his new friend and old brother Neville his toad back.

Before any of them knew it, it was time to get off the train. A quick change into school robes for the one non-magical raised in the group, a change of form for the one famous magical in the group, and they were ready.

They were escorted to a small dock and then into boats by a massive guy named Hagrid. Harry elbowed Nym when they saw the man, each of them in quiet awe of the man's size. They each knew a _lot_ about what was physically possible, and this Hagrid fellow was simply too big to be allowed.

He was still trying to figure it out while making small talk with Nym and Neville in the boat, right up until they cleared the cove the dock was in, and got an actual view of Hogwarts. In an instant Harry understood why people came there. Just being in line of sight, he could practically feel the magic coming off the place in waves. It felt like his wand had when he first laid a finger on it , but... _bigger_.

As they got closer to the castle, their view was cut off by the massive cliff the castle rested on.

"Heads down, everyone," called out the enormous man, and after passing under a large stone overhang, the group of first year students found themselves inside a cavern with another dock. They each disembarked, and made their way up several hundred feet of staircase to find themselves before a door that stood nearly seven meters tall.

Hagrid made a quick head count, then knocked three times on the door, which opened immediately to the stern visage of a highland lass. Thus were Harry and his friends introduced to the finest magical teaching institution in the western hemisphere.

* * *

><p>Before long the mass of first years stood before the people they would be spending the next six years with. There was a significant amount of not-so-subtle staring and muttering. Harry Potter, the savior of wizarding society the world over was supposed to be part of this year after all! Harry guessed that were he not, in point of fact, himself, he too may have indulged in a little recreational staring action. If he really thought about it, he couldn't blame them, but the knowledge that six class year's worth of students and evidently the full staff table were all looking for him wasn't really a comfort, somehow.<p>

He had a few discussions with Amelia over this, and they , despite two weeks, hadn't reached a solid conclusion. Harry had to have some kind of physical arrangement, some definite form he was going to use here. It didn't have to be his base form, after all it didn't cost him anything to maintain a transformation, just to get there in the first place. Unfortunately his base appearance was easily associated with Harry Potter. It all came down to whether or not he wanted to eventually be outed as Harry Potter. Whether or not he wanted to deal with all that, and in fairness to him, there was an awful lot of that.

He was entered on the roll call for Hogwarts twice, after all. Amelia had ensured he was on as H Bones when she adopted him, and the name Potter had been down since his covert birth in Godric's Hollow. He could be whoever he wanted to, but he did have to pick in the next few minutes. His decision would be made one way or the other as soon as the name H Bones was called by Professor McGonagall.

Nym, Susan, and Hannah were clustered around him, each giving as much non-verbal support as they could. None of them had any valuable insight on the decision, he checked. Even Hermione and Neville were sensing his discomfort. They were assuming it was due to the upcoming sorting, which in a way it was.

Harry wanted to honor the woman that saved him. Harry also wanted to honor the woman that gave birth to him, and the man that helped that whole process along. Harry wanted to just live his damn life. Where the devil could he find option three in this whole mess? A small part of him kind of missed just being H Bones.

Unfortunately while he wasted all that time deciding his future, the sorting hat sang its song, and names were already rolling off the list held in the hands of an irate Scotswoman.

Abbot, Hannah was sent to the house of his noble ancestor Helga Hufflepuff. His dear sister Bones, Susan followed suit. After her name, his decision was reached. The Name Bones, H was called, and Harry didn't come forward to answer. Nym squeezed hard where she had a grip on his hand. Harry idly wondered why they went by last name alphabetically, but H somehow came after Susan? Maybe they went reverse alphabetically by first name in the event of siblings? Or was it a ladies first kind of thing? From Godric's journal it seemed like he would have wanted it that way. Helga would have wanted it the other way though, but she did like it like that through spite and only when it amused her to make Godric angry. Come to think of it, maybe she didn't actually care when it came to naming traditions that would be followed for the next thousand years? It wasn't a feminism thing, she just liked annoying the ever loving hell out of her normally unflappable husband. If her journal was any kind of tell, it was her favorite hobby by a pretty wide margin. Hmmm... If only Rowena had living descendants to inherit her journals. But then, if they weren't inherited, where did they go? She wouldn't have _not _had journals or research notes. She also wouldn't have just left them lying around. Maybe after that whole debacle with Helena she put them here somewhere? Her whole deal was some of the most tragic load of bollocks Harry had ever heard, and he had heard of, well him, he guessed. That whole line of thought just kept circling itself, so he shook his head and cleared it away for another time.

Refocusing on the outside world, Harry looked up. Shite. Where did everyone else go? He was standing next to that red headed kid from the train and some other guy, everyone else was sitting. Hermione, Neville, Susan, Hannah, and Nym were all at the yellow and black table giving him some incredibly confused looks. He had solidly missed both of his names being called. Double shite. That's what he got for not paying attention. It was a third solution though. Now, how was he going to play this? The redhead was called followed by the other guy. Turned out the ginger was Ronald Weasley and tall dark and handsome was Blaise Zabini, good to know he figured, but now he was standing alone in front of about a thousand people. This was exactly the kind of thing he hoped to avoid.

He knew both his mum, his sister, his friends, and especially Hermione would all not be pleased with him and this thought processes, but under his breath he felt compelled to whisper, "Well Fuck."

Professor McGonagall beckoned him forward, and in a brisk tone that mysteriously didn't carry in the cavernous hall asked him who he was and if his name had been called.

Harry sighed, moment of truth.

"Sorry ma'am, but, no ma'am. My mum took me to get an inheritance ritual at Grongotts two weeks ago, I'm an orphan, see. I was registered under H Bones, but that's not really true anymore, so I was confused, also," Harry closed his eyes for a second and let himself fall back into the normal appearance he kept around the house, his awful hair resurfacing alongside his slightly more broad face, "Things are just sort of complicated for me."

There were gasps along the hall, followed instantly by whispered explanations from those that knew. There was a metamorph at Hogwarts, things were about to become more interesting. As the whispers continued, and behind McGonagall's back, Nym shifted her hair wildly through the rainbow in a show of solidarity.

Two metamorphs, very interesting then.

At the center of the room the poor Transfiguration professor's brain short circuited for a moment, her eyes widening at the blatant display of ability, "Well. I. Er. I. Umm...," McGonagall put a hand to her hip and began scratching her head with the other.

Harry let a blush cross his cheeks for a moment, and lifting his hand discretely to where it was blocked by their bodies, made the rings the Goblins gave him flicker back into visibility, "I'm also apparently a lord?"

The old woman's jaw dropped slightly. Another development that would complicate things. Now that she knew what she was looking for she could feel the magic on the rings, like a shadow at the edge of her vision. They were Head of House rings, for a Noble and Ancient House, with everything those capital letters implied. She felt a shudder through her magic, a third eye she had blinded many decades ago wiggled slightly in awful anticipation of the paperwork she would be forced to fill out regarding this eleven year old child.

In his defense, she reflected, he was indeed apparently a lord.

Shaking her head, she refocused, "We shall just table the name issue for now, I think, er, milord. Lets just get you sorted so the feats may begin."

Harry was only too happy to comply.

Neither of the two speaking privately at the sorting stool could know it, but McGonagall had never once been seen so flustered in all of the time she had spent in the halls of Hogwarts. Her appearing confused was making Dumbledore actually forget that Harry Potter hadn't been sorted, or even sent a letter by the magic of Hogwarts. The aged headmaster, and arguably master of all of the wizarding people of the United Kingdom, hadn't been this worried since the last war.

Harry quickly sat and McGonagall placed the hat on his head. There was a beat of silence, the whole hall was intrigued by where the boy would be placed, not in the least because he was a metamorph at this stage, this was the most flustered anyone had seen the old tabby.

Then the sorting hat broke a thousand years of tradition by speaking out of turn in order to say, "Daaaaaaaaamn."

For twenty minutes, in a atmosphere of hushed whispers and grumbly bellies, that hat proceeded to carry an animated and very silent conversation with the boy beneath its rim. Finally Harry took off the hat and turned giggling to a speechless and incredibly hungry hall.

He took a few steps towards his friends, doing his best to suppress his snickers, "Thanks, Val! Good talk! Call out for Hedwig if you wanna just shoot the breeze sometime."

Abruptly, as though a silenceing charms had suddenly given out, the hat's apparent laughing movements became audible,"Hahahahaha, will do, kid, will do. And you remember, if that wand tells you something, you listen, eh?"

"Yes sir!" Harry threw the hat a jaunty salute, before sitting down at a speechless Hufflepuff table.

No one clapped, no one moved. Up at the front of the hall Mcgonagall hadn't stopped staring at the hat.

On the stool, Valentino the Hat puffed up for a second and said out loud, "Sorry! Kid distracted me, dear god watch out for this one."

From where he sat between Nym and Hermione, Harry called out, "Hey you were the one to say no sharing!"

"Shut up, kid! Anyway, HUFFLEPUFF!"

Susan and Hannah face palmed, Nym smiled, Hermione and Neville looked astounded, and somewhere across the country the head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement shivered and got a bad feeling in the pit of her stomach.

* * *

><p><em>Much<em> later that night, Harry smiled as he lay back in his bed. It had been a good day. He found two new friends, it appeared as if the love he shared with his friends was enough to get them all into the house of his ancestor, and he had managed to get through an entire two hour long meeting with the man himself, Albus Dumbledore without giving a single thing away that he did not intend to.

The entire school had seen him morph, but being a metamorph was something that wasn't much fun to hide, he and Nym hadn't planned on keeping it a secret at all.

Hedwig's existence was an entirely open secret, the _Prophet_ had done a piece on them not too long ago anyhow.

Dumbles had been very insistent that he reveal which Most Ancient and Noble Houses he was head of, to which Harry had claimed familial privileges, specifically regarding the personal security of the head of house. The old man had also been very insistent that Harry give that name he had been born with so he could be properly registered with the school. Harry updated his admission to Harry Bones, then claimed familial privileges. The master and commander of Hogwarts (as far as he knew) proceeded to demand that Harry reveal any and all knowledge he possessed about the location, wellbeing, and fate of one Harry James Potter. Harry chuckled that the man who had never once checked on him at the Dursleys would know what he looked like, then claimed familial privileges. It was fun, and entirely unfair, exactly how much he could just sweep under the rug with that particular loophole, and it was one of dozens littering the justice system, was somewhat obscene.

That conversation was one of the reasons he was so glad that he was a metamorph. Control over his body meant he had some control over his scars. He couldn't make them go away, something about the transformation magic that helped him heal and made him _very_ difficult to injure stopped him from making the reminders of the wounds he _did_ get disappear. The control he had was over placement. Harry just made sure to move all his scars to his lower back whenever he morphed. It was out of the way, and no one would think of looking at an eleven year olds back to find a certain lightning bolt shaped scar. After finding out who he was, Harry had done an extensive survey of his body and managed to turn up the scar that should have identified him.

His mum had coached him well on everything he needed to keep what secrets he had. The girls all had a number of years worth of occlumency practice which while not especially effective in preteens, did mean that push come to shove, his secrets were safe there.

Overall, definitely a good day.


	8. Chapter 7: Classes and Giants

Chapter Seven: Classes and Giants

Harry got up early the next morning. He had a rich full day planned for his first twenty four hours at Hogwarts, and if he wanted to clear out his to-do list, he had to get going.

Dawn saw him tickling a painting of a pear near the entrance to the Hufflepuff common room. James Potter's journal had been clear on exactly how often the elves of Hogwarts had come through for him, and beyond how useful being on good terms with them was, Harry just wanted to see his people.

Even if he had put most of the years of abuse he had suffered firmly behind him, there were some things that just didn't change. One of those things is what had prompted the elves working on the Bones family properties to officially adopt him as an honorary elf. There was a true kinship between beings that lived to serve, Harry's years spent serving a family that hated him, the years spent working as a literally nameless serf, made him a part of what made a house elf a house elf. It was a cultural thing.

They were just _his_ people, so Harry made it a priority to go in and meet the local chapter.

He got out of the kitchens shortly before breakfast was set to start, having met all of the primary elves in charge of the different pieces of Hogwarts. After promising to come in and do a little bonding with them later in the week over the remainder of the opening feast's dishes, Harry went upstairs to grab a bite.

His entrance into the great hall did not go unmarked, as the Hogwarts rumor mill was going wild over the first student in living memory to both distract the sorting hat, and get the hat to actively speak outside of its normal song. His name not being formally called was strange, but not too unusual. There were a number of kids over the last few years who had to do the same thing. Everyone currently a student was part of the end of the war generation, last name issues weren't altogether uncommon with the amount of orphans it left.

By the time he finally hit the great hall his friends were already there, so Harry poked a surly early morning Nym, forcing her to move over a bit on the bench and make room between her and Hermione so he could sit. Her skin tone moved a shade closer to red as he poked her, it was a game they played in the morning sometimes (Harry played it, anyway) where her coloration represented how close she was to committing murder. It laid at a comfortable rosy pink already, and Harry suspected it was because Hermione looked like she was a morning person. The bushy haired witch's brightly smiling face proving it.

"I can't wait to get our schedules and go to our first classes! Today is the first day we get to learn magic!"

Harry smiled. He knew how she felt. He had been there too, back two years ago. Harry still remembered his first afternoon in the library at the Ossuary fondly. Before too long their portly and vivacious head of house came by and gave them their schedules. Their first day had charms, potions, and herbology to look forward to, and when the group all finished their breakfasts, they moved along to their first classroom.

Charms was taught by Fillius Flitwick, the same man who had taught his folks. Lily's journals had some amusing anecdotes about the man, but were overwhelming filled with warmth in reference to the tiny quarter Goblin. Fifteen minutes into the class, Harry could see why. Professor Flitwick had a consuming passion for his subject, and when Harry, Nym, Susan, and Hannah all killed their first attempts, he nearly exploded in happiness.

Harry carefully noted the hours Flitwick had open for people to visit him in his office, and resolved to go and talk to him about some of the things from his birth-mum's journals. Subtly of course, wouldn't do to give anyone confirmation of who he was.

They had a brief break, during which the friends wandered about the castle in a general downwardly direction. Something that everyone agreed on, Amelia, Andi, the Abbots, his parent's journals, and even the founders, was that the castle had… inconsistent… geography. Hermione had wanted to see the library, but everyone else was more than happy to wander and shoot the breeze as they made their way to the potions dungeon.

Soon they were waiting at the door to the classroom, and Harry and Nym were competing again to see who could morph closest to a dog. The pair had gone farther in their work as metamorphs than probably any other in recent history, two years of constant competition in self-transfiguration had led them to the point where they could do nearly complete physical transformations, into almost any form they could think of. The last barrier that both were looking to breach was transfiguration of the head and brain, which was actually the hardest part of the animagus transformation process and all human transfiguration. As it stood, Susan, Hermione, Hannah and Neville were all laughing as two big barking dogs with massive pitbull-ish heads (in order to compensate for increased brain size) were chasing each other around their legs. The pair's antics ate up the minutes until the class formally began and before anyone knew it the entire first year classes of Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw were filing into the potions room.

Professor Severus Snape stood at the front of the room, his cloak gently waving in a breeze that seemed to only affect him. Harry loosely paid attention as he talked on about potions. Something about bottling fame and brewing glory, both of which sounded unlikely to him.

The professor began calling out role, pausing minutely at Harry's name. After he finished the roll call, he flicked his wand at the board, revealing a recipe for what he called a simple boil curing potion, before he left the room entirely, leaving into what looked like a massive storage closet. Harry shared a dubious look with Hermione and Susan who were sharing a table with him.

"Is this what potions is? He talks a bit, then puts directions up and leaves?"

Hermione looked deeply conflicted, and Susan spoke up, "You remember what Aunty told us, he probably wasn't going to be a good teacher," Susan leaned closer to Harry and began whispering, "Your mum wrote that he was good at brewing, but just a monster of a person. I suppose this is just how he teaches."

Harry nodded, and the trio at the bench got their ingredients together and began brewing. Snape reappeared at the end of the class period, and collected samples from each of the student groups. Then he just told all of the kids to leave. Harry was really glad he hadn't outed himself as a Potter. The Lord only knew how a man who acted like this to random people would act towards the son of the woman he betrayed and the man he hated.

The group ate lunch, and shortly thereafter went through a delightful lesson in herbology. Professor Sprout was a warm and kind woman, and the subject matter was something Harry had a _lot_ of personal experience with. He didn't have a tenth of the natural ability Neville seemed to possess, but between the two of them they carried the girls through the lesson.

With classes done for the day, Harry was free to pursue his to-do list. Objective one combined general castle exploration with retracing the steps of his ancestors. Godric and Helga both dedicated a lot of time to stalking their dear friends Rowena through the castle, somewhat Scooby-Doo in Harry's opinion, and due entirely to a deadly cocktail of curiosity, boredom, and an odd fascination with the poor woman's tumultuous personal life.

The pair tracked their friend around the castle and their suspicions were collectively aroused when half the time she managed to disappear completely on the seventh floor. Harry wanted to have a bit of a look around.

Of the group, only Nym was really interested in more wandering with Harry. The rest of the group was working on boning up on transfiguration for the next day, but seeing as both Nym and The two metamorphs took to wandering up and down the halls on the seventh floor with a glamored copy of volume four of Helga's journal. Amelia hadn't let originals leave the vault, and had glamoured the copy Harry had made so no one would be able to see it as anything but a late edition of _Hogwarts: A History_.

Nym was quickly distracted by a tapestry of what appeared to be an insane wizard introducing some swamp trolls to ballet, slowly trying to get her features to match those of the wizard, while Harry was walking up and down the hallway muttering and paging through the journal.

"Helga was better at tracking magical traces than Godric was, and her maps of the signature trails seemed to end in this hallway, but what was up here for her? I wish Hermione were here, she said she memorized Hogwarts: A History, maybe they closed off a suite or a classroom or something?"

Harry slowly trailed off as he noticed a door appear in the wall behind Nym. Nym turned to him, assuming he had been distracted by her.

"What? See something you like?" she said with a cheeky grin.

Harry's gaze didn't waver for an instant as he said with conviction, "Yes. Yes I do."

He took a few slow steps towards her, his eyes burning with a green fire like the heart of an emerald in firelight, her distraction driving her to fall unintentionally back into her base form.

"I dunno Harry we're still a bit young for that kinda thing, I do like you but maybe we should wait a few years, it's not like we don't have time and like I said we're too you and it wouldn't be responsible and..."

Harry figured out where her mind was (the gutter) before he started walking, so he decided to prolong the embarrassment for her. She babbled more and more as he got closer, until he was almost making contact and she looked like she was standing in front of an oncoming train. Then he took a quick step to the right and continued on to the door, leaving the eleven year old metamorph confused, embarrassed, and _just_ a little frustrated.

He laughed, as he crossed to the door and opened it, looking back at her instead of in.

"Well, you coming? Or would it be irresponsible and something we should do when we're older?"

Nym stomped up and smacked his shoulder, "Prat."

Inside was a massive workroom, with six huge tables running down the center, each supporting a dozen cauldrons that looked like they'd seen better days. In shelves across the room lay dozens of hand written volumes, and on massive slates hanging from the ceiling were written even more odd patterns and esoteric equations.

Nym and Harry both gave a gasp. A secret room. A secret _work_ room.

Rowena's secret work room?

Harry gave Nym a curious look, "There is no way this is what it looks like, right?"

Nym walked forward and paged through an open book on a lectern at the head of the hall. Harry started looking through some of the parchment rolls on the table at the edges of the hall.

"I dunno, Harry. This looks like a journal, and it looks pretty authentic, and... yeah. This is signed as volume seventy-four of the research notes of Rowena Ravenclaw."

Harry hurried over and began looking beside her at the bound volume.

"Do you think she kept the rest of her journals around here somewhere?"

As soon as the words left Harry's mouth, a table appeared next to the pair loaded two deep with even more leather-bound journals, each with a single number embossed on the front. Both kids jumped when it materialized.

"You just asked for it and it appeared!" Nym exclaimed, torn between disbelief and plain old amazement.

Harry looked around with a new glint in his eye, and addressed the room at large, "Can I see Ravenclaw's collected research notes?"

Immediately a new series of bookshelves appeared along the wall next to the door, each filled with bound notebooks that were numbered in the same style as the journal next to them.

"Let's save the exploration for when we have the group together, sound good?" Nym nodded, "I'll grab her first journal, and the notebook she had out. Maybe it explains this stuff," Harry said, waving a hand at the cauldrons, and floating crystals, and the lightly glowing runes.

Harry grabbed the books, and the pair beat feet out of the mysterious room. One of the first things every child was taught upon introduction to the greater magical world was to never, ever, trust any object that could think for itself. Amelia had been in prime position to witness some truly disturbing things done by door knobs, bed-pans, and wristwatches that had been enchanted to life. Naturally she had been very keen to impart to her muggle raised son that tidbit; fi you can't see what it uses to think, do not trust it. The room was cool, scary, and definitely qualified for that warning.

As Harry and nym descended to the dungeons, and Hufflepuff House, Harry glanced again at his to-do list.

- Explore castle (seventh floor?)

- Head transfiguration

-Shrieking shack

-Morph into a stag

-Prank headmaster's office

-Figure out why Hagrid was nine feet tall

Optional/impossible:

- Make Minerva actively smile

If he found something this absolutely insane on day one/objective one, he was honestly afraid of how the next week was going to go. At least it'd be interesting? After all, what was Hogwarts really hiding if two kids could find that?

* * *

><p>Harry attended the rest of his classes over the next few days, and added exorcising Professor Binns to his list. One period was enough to tell every first year all they needed to know about the class. Even Hermione was upset, though that <em>may<em> have been due to being called Herman every time she raised her hand to ask a question.

If anything, Defense Against the Dark Arts was even worse. The professor's stutter was so bad he averaged eight complete sentences an hour, leaving them with a about a long paragraph of notes and information over the course of the first week. Harry didn't want to discriminate against a person with a disability, but he couldn't help but think that if your stutter was that bad, maybe you should 't try to run what appeared to be a lecture only class in front of twenty five kids.

Transfiguration had been interesting at least. For their class McGonagall had showed off her skill as an animagus, which impressed everyone to no end, Nym and Harry in particular. The girls and Neville had split the two shapeshifters up at their tables so everyone could take equal advantage of their skill, a strategy that seemed to lead to success.

Professor's McGonagall's speech about transfiguration being one of the most dangerous magics they would do at Hogwarts confused the young metamorphs, however. The going theory they were developing with Andi as part of their on-going research into themselves was that their very cells were completely impregnated with transfiguration magic. All of the research they had on other metamorphmagi in the past seemed to support the theory as well. At least as far as they could tell, organized record keeping at St. Mungos hadn't really caught on until the late 1800s, which left over two hundred years of medical history documented only by purchase receipts and the personal diary of a rather risqué nurse who served between 1650 and 1745.

The friends sat through thirty minutes of scare and safety lecture before they were each given an incantation, and a match meant to interface with a pincushion.

Harry and Nym each completed their tasks almost immediately, but in fairness it was more of an instinctual act for the pair of than any kind of real effort. Their friends weren't quite on the same level, but they weren't without hope, because Harry did have a bit of an ace up his sleeve. Well, a second ace up his sleeve. One he could share, really the first ace was more of a tattoo. The card metaphor broke down pretty quickly, so Harry abandoned that line of thought and helped his friends by sharing the wisdom of his father.

James Potter was a deft hand with transfiguration, and after ten or so years of practice, after he left the halls of Hogwarts and moved on to greener pastures, he pinned down why. Transfiguration was a magic of physical change, so while an incantation to focus one's intent was very helpful, a physical and spatial understanding of the change in question could work as an excellent substitute. The two together made perfection. If you could _see_ the match narrow, _see_ the grains merge and the shine increase and the match become metallic in front of you, if you had all of that you were a pinch of magical effort from your goal.

James Potter, by even the best recollection, had an unhealthy flair for the dramatic. He waxed poetic about his favorite discipline in his personal journals frequently, and then Lily became pregnant and his words took on a fevered tone. He was so pleased with having a son that it was all he could write about. Teaching his son transfiguration, using that skill to convert one of those cherry pies Padfoot loved so much into something a little less table, and then hiding behind his son when Lily got mad about the pie and terrified dog in the kitchen.

James Potter may have been an idiot.

When the friends finished their assignment Harry and Nym began experimenting, as they were wont to do. Only in minor direct contravention to the safety lecture they had receive fifteen minutes previously. Their challenge was to turn one match into _two _needles, mostly to see if they could. So while most of their classmates were still working on the assignment, or in one case trying to put out the match he had accidentally lit, Harry had his wand in hand and was concentrating on a pair of dull metal sticks, and Nym was in much the same position with two beautifully formed wooden needles.

Neither were above jealously looking at the other's work before furiously returning to their own, something their teacher noted with a decidedly upturned eyebrow.

Over the course of the rest of the lesson each got closer to their goal and the rest of their friends worked on ease and speed of casting. Hermione in particular got the spell down to the work of just a few seconds, before turning to Harry with some questions.

At least that's what it looked like for a brief moment, before she saw Harry and Nym behind her blatantly ignoring Professor McGonagall's warnings about safety and just messing about directly under their teacher's nose.

She poked Harry hard in the side, prompting him to squeak quietly, and began whispering to him in an angry tone, "What do you think you are doing! The professor specifically told us not to experiment or misuse any of this magic! Stop that right now!"

For his part Harry turned to her, rubbing his side, and with relative calm, "Hermione, Nym and I have been doing this exact kind of thing for over a year now, we have the blessings of a fully qualified healer too, we—"

McGonagall's refined voice broke in from behind them, "Back to work."

Hermione shot Harry a superior look, which quickly became exasperated when he turned right back to his challenge with Nym.

At the end of the hour both made it. Harry had made it first, which meant Nym had to give up their standard forfeit and put on a pig nose. She snorted loudly at a giggleing Hannah as they packed their things.

Before they could leave Minerva called out, "Mr. Bones and Ms. Tonks, please remain behind."

The pair looked at each other guiltily, Nym morphing back to her standard forms while Hermione sniffed meaningfully at them.

"It has not escaped my notice that the two of you are metamorphmagi, as you have not been especially subtle about it, I imagine this is not a surprise. Your performance today, as well as how you each helped your friends, also did not escape my notice. Take ten points each to Hufflepuff for helping your fellows understand transfiguration. Take an additional five points each for completing your assignments first, and doing something I was not sure was possible, transfiguring your matches into two needles without a separate conjuration."

The pair shared a victorious glance.

"I would like to provide you with an additional assignment. Are you each capable of conjuring a handkerchief?"

The decidedly feline professor was met with two nods.

"Please do so."

Harry looked at Nym, Nym looked at Harry, and with a shared giggle they each conjured a handkerchief featuring a picture of the other. Harry's had Nym with a duck bill (a transformation she still had yet to master), and Nym's featured a Harry with a feminine figure and waist length pink hair. They traded when they finished.

Minerva observed the pair, and suppressing a smile, continued, "Very good, are you capable of duplicating your conjurations?"

Two more nods, followed by whispered _Gemino_ charms, and before the transfiguration mistress were four comic portraits of the students in front of her. Minerva decided to just go for broke, telling the children that what they were doing was ridiculous and impossible served no purpose. They had done it. The evidence was before her. Their year of practical self transfiguration, or perhaps competitive practical self transfigurations, had some undeniable and impressive results, but given they had three hundred sixty five days of experience and she taught each student perhaps six hours a week…

"Please transform one of your handkerchiefs into a kitten," she said with the edges of a smile creeping onto her face.

"Professor? Could you take your other form so we could get a better visual of a cat? I don't think we've seen one outside Diagon Alley in several years," Harry said, Nym nodded vigorously at his side.

She did so, allowing the students to pet her briefly, before changing back and urging them to their work. The transformation took each of them a minute, but before long there was a ginger kitten playing with a Siamese on the desk in front of them.

Minerva idly conjured a ball of yarn for the kittens to play with, before sitting down in front of the pair.

"I know you have lunch now, so why don't I call for one of the elves to bring us some sandwiches while we discuss your future in this class," she said, as a full smile graced her face.

That evening Harry crossed another goal off his list.

Defense against the Dark Arts, on the other hand, was tedious, and not only just to say in casual conversation. Seriously, Harry thought, it was a mouthful. By their second period of it, the friends had turned entirely over to referring to it as DADA, which was to say 'dee-æ-dee-æ'. The friends almost entirely lacked fathers, and didn't need to bring up their masculine parental figure issues.

Beyond how annoying Harry found the nomenclature, the Professor seemed like he may in fact need some kind of neurological therapy. Harry and Nym got to talking about it, and their first guess was that the man had some kind of advanced form of Tourette's that hindered his normal speech, and which possibly had an origin in some kind of vampire related event. His stuttering and constant physical tics left his class only a small notch higher than Binns' in terms of overall usefulness and interest.

It took one lesson with him before the Hufflepuffs showed the traits of their house and arranged a study group, inviting along their Gryffindor friends. Quirrell, aside from making Harry generally feel uneasy, and for some reason making his scars ache a little, was utterly useless.

During class Harry sat next to Hannah and both worked on their use of proper Received Pronunciation as an accent. Harry thought it was hilarious, and Hannah had small aspirations to being one of the voices that worked professionally on the Wizarding Wireless Network for their dramas.

Hermione was as angry with the group over their treatment of DADA as she was with their treatment of History of Magic and their negligence in transfiguration, most of which the friends goofed off for and then made up all of their study later on their own.

Neville and Susan stuck with Nym, who spent her time literally making faces at them. She was on a search for the most realistic face she could pull that looked like a love child of Snape and Draco.

Astronomy had turned out to just be a class, uninteresting in general because it lended no context to any of the concepts it tried to teach. Harry heard some of the older years talking about it being good because they thought, and he quoted, that 'Sinistra was a choice bird'. Harry both was a metamorph and knew a lady metamorph so looks didn't mean much to him.

* * *

><p>As the first week ended, Harry tried to find an excuse to meet the groundskeeper again. His biological folks had been friends and said only great things about the man, covering for catching them out after hours, having them over for tea in the winter, providing some more <em>exotic<em> ingredients from the forest, showing them the local unicorn herd, things like that.

The only problem was that Harry was Harry Bones and not Harry Potter, so that wouldn't work as an excuse. Harry still wasn't one hundred percent on how manners worked in the magical world, but something told him that walking up to the guy and straight asking him how he got to be nine feet tall wasn't polite. As far as he knew, Harry didn't even have anything in common with the giant of a man, so he resolved to keep his ear to the ground about the guy, his curiosity overwhelming him.

Nym thought he was strange for being curious and caring, and Harry couldn't offer her a reason why he wasn't. Harry was just obsessed with self-transfiguration, even if he spent most of his time in at least ninety percent of his base form. Being nine feet tall would be hard for him, and he was constructed on a base level to be whatever he wanted to be. Someone who was that way naturally was curious!

As it turned out, he didn't have to wait too long. During breakfast Friday morning a strange owl found its way to the table of the badgers, plopping down with no small amount of exasperation in front of Harry. The owl looked like it had seen better days, but it also lacked the age for that to be a real thing. A number of its feather seemed to be bent the wrong direction, and its head was at a permanent fifteen degree angle relative to the ground which Harry was fairly sure was not normal.

Harry knew the avian form very well, aside from their collected desire to be canine, birds were the second form he and Nym had been working on. The transformations were impossible, or at least impossible to survive, if they didn't understand the bone structure, the routes of the blood vessels, and the placement of the nerve endings so their study led to at least a greater than average understanding of owls. Harry gently took his wand and placed it at the bird's neck and began channeling energy into the bird, exercising something he, Susan, and Hannah had discovered in the woods surrounding the Bones Manor.

Magical animals had a lot of magic inside themselves, and that magic knew what they were supposed to be and what they were supposed to do. It was why anything magical was remarkably more resilient that it's mundane counterpart. Magicals had magic inside them telling their bodies that they are supposed to work better, or keep working, essentially telling and forcing their body to just shrug off what would incapacitate a non-magical, like a kind of biological inertia it kept magicals going longer and stronger than they otherwise had any right to. By channeling raw power into a post owl, a magical owl, Harry knew he could give its internal magic a bit of extra oomph in enforcing how it's body was supposed to be, if it was to be healthy.

The owl in front of him straightened it neck with a wince inducing crack, and looked around with significantly more acuity than had been present before. It preened for a moment, and gave Harry's fingers a small affectionate nip. Harry smiled as he petted the owl.

After a few minutes of the owl soaking up some love and attention from the Hufflepuff crowd it scuffled down the table back to Harry and stuck out its leg, which had a small scroll attached. Harry laughed as he relieved the owl of its burden. It had been so enamored with the attention it got that it forgot to do its job! The scroll was written in a large and messy hand, and it politely asked Harry to drop by when he didn't have classes in the afternoon. Hagrid had heard alongside most of the country that he had a phoenix as a familiar and wanted to meet one in person (Dumbledore was evidently stingy about letting people meet his fabled companion).

Harry leaned back from his spot on the bench and found Hagrid's eyes up at the staff table. With a wave and a thumbs up, Harry secured an afternoon tea date for himself and Hedwig. In retrospect, he suspected that Hedwig's flared wings and joyful cry may have had something to do with it.

Hedwig had adapted quickly to life in the castle. As a truly bound familiar, she kept on Harry's shoulder nearly all the time during his classes. Professor Snape had looked as though he wanted to raise a stink about its presence in the potion's lab, but Harry was legally entitled to having his favorite immortal bird with him at all times by an embarrassing number of laws and statutes. Hedwig was family after all, and Harry wouldn't allow anyone to separate him from his family, or messed with them. Beyond all of that, she was still a newborn phoenix, and had yet to have even her first burning day. She seemed to be maturing at an abnormally slow rate by phoenix standards, and in fact she seemed to be at or near where Harry was developmentally, seemingly not advancing any further than he did. No one in the family (or their two new friends) was sure what to make of it, for that matter the few unspeakables still interested also didn't appear to know what was up, but perhaps Hagrid who was said to have immense knowledge of magical creatures and their care could shed some light on everything.

Harry slogged through his day, passing securely through History of Magic without gaining anything from the lecture, and moving toward his afternoon tea. When class ended he packed his text in a hurry and after pausing to gather Nym and Neville, set off for the small cottage on the edge of the forbidden forest.

As they drew nearer to the edge of the cottage, Harry had to pause to look at the forest. It felt strange to him. Actually just the fact that he could feel it struck him as weird. It was something like his wand and Hogwarts. His wand was sweet, but it was like water. It could flow and move, and it could crush and smother and drown, it was fast power. Hogwarts was _old_. It was knowledge, and warmth and love. This forest was dark. It had secrets. It wasn't even that it felt unwelcoming, but it felt like you definitely had to earn entrance to it.

Or Harry could be crazy. All things considered, the odds were about fifty-fifty on that one.

The three kids knocked on the great wooden door to the hut, and as soon as knuckle hit wood an incredible barking could be heard from the other side of the door.

"Back Fang! Calm down ye great beast! I asked them kids here, no need ter be crazy! Down boy!"

The door cracked open to reveal one small eye set into a massive face, and a curious snout easily the size of Harry's head.

"Ah! Great ter see ye here! I don't have a clock in here me self, so I weren't quite sure if it was the right time yet," The door opened further, and the biggest dog any of them had ever seen bounded out and began sniffing them, "Fang here is always happy to have company. He's a big softy, you'll love'im. And ye brought Hedwig with ye! Fantastic! I'm glad you were interested in coming down ter meet me. Not a lot of folks willing to spend time with an old groundskeeper like me. I knew most of your folks when they passed through here. Amelia was a nice lady, so were Andromeda and that Ted Tonks fella when she brought him 'round. And I'll never forget Alice and Frank as long as I live."

He beamed down at the first years from his lofty perch, easily four or more feet above each of their heads.

They followed the massive man inside his house, Fang following Nym who took the rear. When they got inside, Hagrid directed them to chairs round his table. Everything in the house was built to a larger scale than the kids were used to, but they soon found comfortable places. Hedwig hopped from Harry's shoulder to the table with a quick flap, and Fang rested his massive head in Nyms lap. Having quickly taken a shine to the young witch.

"Ah, such a beautiful bird, aren't ya?." Hagrid said, as he used one of his massive fingers to scratch at the spot just at the back of her head, causing contented cooing to fill the room.

"Do you know much about phoenixes, Hagrid? Hedwig doesn't seem to be growing as fast as other phoenixes we've read about. We're not sure if something is wrong, or if there's just something we don't know about them. They're rather rare, and Hedwig isn't much help."

Hagrid switched his scratching to just beneath her beak and was quiet for a bit before he responded, "I don't rightly know. Like a lot of magical creatures thy don't much care 'bout human things. Think they just like bein' mysterious meself. I can tell ya this though, if'n sommat were wrong she'd let ya know. If she's happy, I reckon she's fine."

Nym was slowly morphing her face to match Fang's, while Harry and Neville began just chit chatting with their new friend.

They learned that Hagrid had been around for a long time. The tiny giant even reminisced somewhat bitterly about how he had been the one to pick 'Harry Potter' up from the ruins in Godric's Hollow, and he had taken him to the Dursleys in a flying motorcycle. That moment answered a number of questions about motorcycle based pain hallucinations from his youth, he couldn't hold it against Hagrid. Harry, having exchanged more than six words with him, firmly believed that Hagrid was the most earnest man he would ever meet in his life. Especially since he couldn't do it publicly right then, Harry laid the blame at the doorstep of his esteemed headmaster.

The kids questions managed to pull out of Hagrid that he had gone to Hogwarts, but had been expelled in his fourth year over a misunderstanding. Hagrid went very quiet when he was asked what happened, but he was clear that he had never been charged with anything. Talking about his time in the school, his face took on a wistful cast. He remembered magic, and if his face was any kind of tell (Harry suspected that Hagrid was a lousy poker player) he had loved every minute of learning magic.

Then, in his youthful curiosity, Harry asked a rather fateful question, "Hagrid, why don't you use a wand?"

"What's that then?"

"Well, you do a lot of work around the grounds, and I mean I haven't been here long, but I've never once seen you use a wand. You were digging trenches for the sixth year Care for Magical Creatures class on Wednesday, and you were doing it by hand. I guess I was just curious why you didn't use a wand."

The large man blinked owlishly, and Harry guessed his cheeks had colored, though it was hard to tell beneath the beard, "Well when ye get expelled, they snap yer wand, didn't they?"

"But you just said you were never convicted of anything. You said it was a misunderstanding. Why couldn't you just get another one? I know it's been a long time since you studied magic, but you're a nice guy. I can tell that and I just met you. Besides, Hedwig," The phoenix inclined her head in Harry's direction, "Is an amazing judge of character, if she likes you there's nothing else to be said. I'm sure Professor Flitwick wouldn't mind helping you learn a bit more. McGonagall too! I bet if you put some effort into it, you could even get your OWLs done."

Hagrid looked away into the distance, probably lost in a memory of his time inside the halls of the school instead of out. He shook his head, his great mane of hair flailing about him.

"Nah, they'd never let me get another."

"Hagrid, what if I were to tell you I knew a fool-proof way to get you one? If you were never convicted then all you need to do is have a sponsor to go get one. If you swear an oath of service to a lord you could get one today.

The man paused in his scratching while he thought, a gentle trill from Hedwig reminded him of his duty and he began again, "Well, I dunno. Who's this lord fella that'd sponsor me? Why would anyone want ter sponsor me in getting a wand?"

Harry smiled, "Maybe because a phoenix he is friends with thinks pretty highly of you. Or possibly because he thinks you're one of the most trustworthy people he could ever hope to know?"

Harry placed his hand in the center of the table, or as close as he could get (it was half-giant scale after all), and with a meaningful look allowed the house rings he wore to phase back into the visible spectrum. Hagrid noticed the rings and his eyes widened comically.

"Wha'? But tha's—"

"Yeah, ridiculous, I know! I mean I'm eleven years old, what the hell, right? But it does mean I can help you."

The much larger man looked from Harry to his rings and back, before running a hand through his beard and slowly nodding.

Hagrid went to Diagon Alley that weekend with a missive written by the duly appointed master of Gryffindor house (Hagrid had been a Gryff in his days in Hogwarts and requested to be bonded to that house. Harry privately felt the man should have been in Hufflepuff, but either way the man got a wand so everyone was happy), releasing funds and ordering whoever saw the writ to ensure his man was properly equipped on the authority of House Gryffindor.


	9. Chapter 8: Troll Time

Chapter Eight: Troll Time

To his extreme boredom and chagrin, Harry's life calmed down for the next month or so. Flying lessons went smoothly for the friends. Harry, Nym, Susan and Hannah were all old hands at broom handling, so they made sure to care for Neville and Hermione as they started flying. With their support the nervous magicals soon found flying to be relatively safe and fun, as long as Harry and nym were't dive bombing one another.

There was a minor uproar in the school's population as a whole when the _Prophet_ announced a break-in to Gringotts. Harry was quick to send an owl to the bank noting his continued faith in their security. One of the things that Amelia had drilled mercilessly into the kids was that Goblins were warriors, most just mounted their axes on the wall behind their desks and began using interest rates and mortgage terms in place of the old shield and crossbow. After a breach of their security, they appreciated having a re-affirmation from an ally. Amelia had been quick to do the same, though on her part it had just a smidge more to do with avoiding a potential treaty violation.

As the break-in faded from the news the whole first year had themselves a laugh at their more… rambunctious members.

Draco Malfoy managed to goad Ron Weasley into a dramatic midnight duel to be held in the trophy room. Everyone soon learned that he had never shown, and just used it as an opportunity to get the redhead caught by the caretaker Filch. The 'Puffs were far enough removed from both sides to enjoy the whole experience, it was a clever move and an amusing way to get back at Ronald Weasley, who constantly acted like a royal prat proving that the whole pureblood arrogance thing wasn't limited to the green and silver crowd.

Part of the amusement surrounding the whole thing was the fact that Weasley had run from Filch and headed into the third floor corridor that Dumbledore had said was forbidden. He claimed to have seen a massive three headed dog, with his two friends Thomas and Finnegan who had gone to back him up in the duel confirming the story. It seemed an idiotic way to get attention.

Harry and the group all didn't believe that Dumbledore and the rest of the staff would honestly be stupid enough to let a three headed guard dog around a bunch of kids who were each would-be vandals and arsonists running about with deadly weapons on their best days.

Harry's time was well claimed by exploring the possibilities of Rowena's secret room full of research and his studies. He was using his father and mother's advice from their journals to good effect in all of his classes, their work putting him and his friends months ahead of their year group. His transfigurations were made from excellent visualizations and his charms were powerful and controlled, but the one place where he jumped ahead of not only his year group but also his friends was in their individual study of DADA.

Spells just clicked for him. In the back of his mind, from somewhere near where he and Hedwig traded feelings and thoughts, the voices of a dozen auguries whispered quietly at him. It freaked him out more than a little, but harry keenly recalled the words of the sorting hat, and he took them to heart.

The almost wordless voices directed his arm a little higher as he learned the _petrificus totalis_, resulting in truer aim. They nudged the jab in his smokescreen spell a little, making the result billow and the practice room much faster. When Harry got cocky and tried the reductor curse, they fairly shouted a smaller and curvier movement into his ear, letting him pull off a fifth year spell in the first place.

The first through third year 'Puffs all meet in the common room at the same time and studied together in most subjects, but when they got around to DADA, Harry's spells began attracting fourth and fifth years to come into the group. Susan had seen his wand selection and so knew something about it's being unique. She hadn't given it a second thought until a fifth year called Harry onto the dueling platform to 'see what he had in him'. They started and harry chose to simply advance on his foe, calmly, and with an expression that caused the boy four years his senior to feel a pinch of doubt.

The fifth year called out _Expelliarmus_, and Harry didn't blink as the red jet of light passed harmlessly over his right shoulder. A flick, and _Diffindo_, met the _Incarcerous_ on its way to him, and without dropping his sedate pace a _protego_ the size of a hand neatly deflected the tickling jinx sent his way.

The ickle firstie stood halfway to his opponent's starting position, and paused for a moment. _Finite_ cancelled _Impedimentia_, _Protego_ met _Verdimillio duo_, and then the older dueller began to feel nervous. _StupefyStupefyStupefy_ forced Harry to dodge, and then to begin running. In an instant he was on top of the older Hufflepuff who panicked and called out the first thing to pass through his mind. _Reducto!_ Drew gasps from all of the watchers.

Harry had been leading with his wand, and when the violent pulse left his opponent's wand the whispers in the back of his head drew his aim _upupupleftdownleft_ and Harry whispered his own _stupefy_. The red light scarcely left the tip of his wand when the incoming blue light crashed into it, redirecting upward just as the stunner was shot down. In a trice the fifth year was wrapped in rope, stunned, and disarmed.

No one blinked. Finally after a beat of silence Nym called Harry a cheater for using his abilities as a metamorph to artificially increase his flexibility and muscle mass. The pre-teen had the grace to blush.

By the time it was rolling around to November, even with his defense practice, Harry was edging toward extremely bored. He had plenty to occupy his attention, but at two months none of it was new anymore. None of it was groundbreaking. Harry honestly couldn't remember ever having been this impatient before, he had years of living in a cupboard to fall back on for training in patience. It was a very recent change in him, he wasn't sure if the girls even really noticed it. In a moment of deep reflection, he realized they had only known him for two years. They didn't not know him well enough to spot it.

He was certain it wasn't the castle, Hedwig, his new friends, or the food. He had actually heard from his Elvin friends that on occasion the staff laced the food with calming draughts and contraceptive potions, out of respect they offered to make sure his food was clean. The only thing he could figure it being was what Valentino the hat had mentioned (and why in the hell did he insist in the inclusion of 'the hat' in his name?), which was the whispering from his wand. They had been coming out more and more in his practice, which was troubling.

It was hard to pin down, but without a real parallel he could draw from his own experience, he could only describe feelings near what it was. His blood was _itching_. It was a restlessness. He needed to do something new, something to get a little adrenaline flowing. It felt like something deep inside him was woken up by the feeling of dueling, and it wanted to be let out to run around a bit. Two months of library work, mild exploring, and mostly being inside figuring out magic wasn't doing it for him anymore.

Then it was Samhain.

That morning was charms, a class that they shared with the red and gold kids to the friend's chagrin. They did their level best to not buy into the whole house stereotype thing, but even Harry who was nominally responsible either to or for the house by virtue of being it's true heir had to admit that the whole bunch seemed totally consumed by the 'Gryffindors charge forward' idea. The Hufflepuff contingent were beginning to realize that the snakes told the lions what to do, the ravens told the lions how to do it, and when everything fell to pieces the badgers came in and took care of everything. Inevitably the lions ended up in the hospital wing, the ravens ended up crying in the library, and the snakes fell to political in-fighting.

In any case, the quarter-Goblin professor had paired each badger with a lion, and they were all working on the wizard's best friend, the levitation charm. The friends had been practicing it since they first met on the Express, and despite what a sixth year had nailed down as wand compatibility issues between Neville and his father's wand, everything was going smoothly. The only issue of any significance was Ron Weasley, prat-boy extraordinaire, who had been paired with Hannah. She diligently tried to get the troll in human form to levitate a feather, with sadly predictable results.

After a solid class filled with failure and abuse from the boy she was helping was beginning to weigh on the normally sunny and quiet girl, thankfully when the period finally let out the Gryffindors packed in a rush and fled the room, allowing the friends time to pack and leave at their leisure. When they entered the hallway, Weasley's voice could be heard floating back to the group, actually questioning the parentage of the girl who had spent an hour and a half teaching him to flick his wand and pronounce two words in pseudo-latin.

Hannah was known for her even keel. When the Bones had first adopted Harry, she fulfilled the classic Hufflepuff role: keeping to the back, and doing all she could to help. She was practically inseparable from Susan, but she was the support behind Susan's exuberance. She encouraged Neville, listened patiently to Hermione, and glared at anything females that so much as glance at Harry with Nym. It made her happy, it was what she did.

Right now, she was red in the face, and only the furious whispers of the other four girls, and quiet support of the two guys kept her from running off to curse the idiot and cry.

Harry, Nym, and Neville exchanged glances. One way or another the problem would be solved. The group headed out to the open greenhouse, which was Hannah and Neville's favorite place to burn time in the castle. Hannah loved sitting in the flower beds nearest the house elf's beekeeping area. Neville loved flowers, and though he would never admit it, being near Hannah.

Lunch rolled around and a whispered request saw a plate of sandwiches popped to them by an elf. The friends skipped out on the DADA lesson which would have filled their afternoon, reasoning that not only had Quirrell yet to give a detention, but the man had never given any indication that he knew who any of his students were. He was often lucky to solidly deliver more than half a dozen sentences in a single period.

By the time they had to get up for the feast Hannah had thoroughly decompressed and was lit from within by her normal understated smiles. The friends dusted themselves free of dirt (an involved process for Neville, who had replanted a few sun-lion-flowers to fresher soil, conveniently nearer where Hannah sat) and moved to the great hall.

The Hufflepuff table sat just to one side of the center line in the hall. To its side lay the table of the lions, and across the aisle lay the Ravenclaw and Slytherin tables. The friends took seats at their table and prepared themselves for the house elve's finest efforts. As more students came in the noise level in the hall rose, and before long lighter fair, the hors d'oeurves, appeared. It was beautiful, and tasty, and as it happened around him Harry just felt impatient and bittersweet. This was his first real anniversary of the day his parents died. He could distract himself with classes and helping a friend, but now? Now he was sitting in the middle of the girl's conversation in the great hall. Now he was supposed to be celebrating a druidic high-holiday. And now the headmaster stood at his podium, saying words Harry didn't listen to about sacrifice and the Potters, and all around him students raised a glass to him. And his dead parents

For an instant, as noise picked back up and students returned to the joy and their meals, for an instant bittersweet became just bitter.

He had a lot. So much more than most, but for all he had, he had no hope of ever even fully understanding what he had lost when he was one. Journals were nice, but they weren't the people who wrote them.

Then the jolly atmosphere and dark cloud over his head were both disrupted when the massive doors to the great hall were slammed against the wall by the entrance of Professor Quirrell.

"TROLL! Troll in the dungeon! Thought you ought to know," The be-turbaned speaker passing straight out as he completed his statement.

There was a beat of silence before the hall exploded into panic. Harry watched as Draco Malfoy actually hugged one of the monkeys he had following him in fear, on the other side of the table Susan, Nym, and Hermione were caught between panic and laughter as they watch Weasley do the same thing to one of the chocolate cakes on the table in front of them. Seemed like the kid turned to food in his panic, who knew?

A series of cannon blasts erupted from the wand of the headmaster at the front of the room, followed by a voice Harry recognized the familiar distortions of a _sonorus_ charm on, "CALM DOWN!" with peace, or dominance, thus established, "Prefects will lead their charges to their common rooms, seventh years lead the way, the staff will go to confront the beast."

The Gryffs charged the door, followed closely by the 'Claws. The badger and snake contingents shared dubious glances. Their common rooms were in the dungeons.

Harry felt a call from his wand, exciting the uneasy buzzing that had been running through his blood the past few days. The buzzing ramped up exponentially until Harry's mind lit up like a christmas tree, and in a moment he made up his mind. The 'Puffs and the snakes were walking into troll territory. They could get hurt. He couldn't allow that. So. Come sunrise, there'd be a shrunken troll's head mounted on the inside of his trunk, or his blood would stop buzzing as he cooled off in the hospital wing.

Hufflepuffs milled uncertainly around their table, and amidst the uncertainty Harry closed his eyes in concentration and with as much focus as he could muster began changing himself. He increased his bone and muscle density, and knocked the production of adrenaline into gear and the natural production of endorphins up a few notches. Silently he thanked two years of competition and the printers of all the mundane biology texts he had consumed alongside Nym. Then he was off, almost bluring as he vaulted the table and sped to one of the few entrances to the dungeons proper.

When he closed with the stairs he was looking for, Harry started thinking. He was hunting troll. Quirrell, despite having not stuttered for once in his life, hadn't passed on any useful information, he could be looking at forest, mountain, or god forbid, swamp. They were all difficult to hurt, let alone kill, but the horns on a swamp troll were known for the venom they secreted, and how it resisted all common wound cleaning and closing magic. One thing all trolls had in common though, regardless of species or whether or not they were just hosed off with industrial solvents, was the fact that they smelled like something had died a week ago and no one bothered to clean up.

He used his study of the canine form to make a few changes to his nasal cavity, increasing his sensitivity to smell. A few hallways of searching found him a smell that burned in his nostrils, and with his metabolism screaming treason and murder from how much energy he was burning through, he went off. His nose led him through, then out of the dungeons and onto the first floor. It seemed like the defense teacher was just as bad with directions as he was at lecturing, the troll was in the school proper, and seemed to be poking around the entrance to the east wing.

Harry's blood was filled with delicious reflex enhancing chemicals, screaming for him to take on what looked like a full grown mountain troll. A small part of his mind, buried somewhere deeply in the back, seemed to think this whole thing was a bad idea. The parts occupied by a connection to a phoenix and the haunted whispers of the spirit of his wand both informed it that it was to shut its useless hole.

As he spotted it near the ladies room Harry's wand began a complicated pattern, whispers of _bombarda-reducto-diffindo-defodio_ in a number of different combinations spilling from his mouth as he ran down the long hall towards the beast. Harry had read through most of the complete works of Newt Scamander when he had first gotten Hedwig's egg, so he had a good idea that the best efforts of an eleven year old would glance off the troll's skin at worst and make in angry at best. He wasn't wrong.

His spells looked like they stung the troll, his gouging spell putting small bloody pockmarks into its hide while the rest seemed to merely annoy, but they worked perfectly for the plan he was still making up. It turned in his direction, and moving its bulk to face him properly, slowly raising its club for a massive overhand strike.

Harry kept up his litany of low-level offensive spells as he got closer and closer. The club rushed down to meet him as he finally entered it range, the strength of the troll generating a physical wind bearing down behind the immense piece of wood.

Just as the club was about to make contact, Hedwig enacted her portion of the impormptu plan. A burst of white fire enveloped the eleven year old as a keening filled the air, at the same moment another burst appeared in the air behind the troll, releasing a young phoenix and a small but dense boy at the same speed they entered from. Harry hit the back of the troll's head feet first, snapping it forward with the stomach churning crunch of injured vertebrae.

The troll was thoroughly concussed and severely over balanced, it crashed forward onto the ground, its club skidding from his hand and impacting hard on the wall of the hallway.

Harry placed his wand to the base of the Troll's skull, and made no incantation. He focused the iron hard will honed by nights of starvation and days of fight and flight to a sharp point, and channeled magic through his wand with one single thought. _CUT_.

* * *

><p>Twenty minutes later a group of Professors ran onto the scene. Flitwick led the group, a dueler's shield flowing dimly around his off hand, his wand held lightly in an arm that spoke of whip-snap movement. Behind him was Professor McGonagall, a conjured marble golem in front of her and two transfigured wolves flanking her. They too had the idea to follow the smell of the troll to its location, but had followed the trail at a significantly lowered pace.<p>

The smell had gotten more and more intense as they closed on the hallway, and as they rounded the corner into the hall way they stopped dead, stunned by the sight in front of them.

Harry was standing next to a wall with a house elf next to him. He was munching on a piece of what Flitwick recognized as baklava while floated the severed head of the troll into different orientations around a shield of wood stuck to the stone, evidently finding an ideal way to display his new trophy. The troll's cauterized stump as well as the rest of its body lay flat out in the hallway behind him, and as they approached closer they caught the end of a conversation.

"...I dunno Slippy, I still think I should just stick it plainly at the back."

"No, no, no, Harry. Slippy did this for old headmaster, two headmasters ago. Proper way is to angle it, so face always looks down and in fear."

"But it won't be mounted on a wall, I'm gonna shrink it and put it on the inside of the lid to my trunk. If I angle it down it'll look weird. And changing its expression just seems disrespectful."

"Well you didn't tell Slippy that! Yes, use your sticky magic, Slippy will shrink for you. Also, yous mounting cut-off head of creature to inside of your trunk and you worried about disrespecting creature?"

"Good point, and thanks, mate," he said with a sheepish smile, "And thanks for the snack too," He said, hefting the mass of sticky desert in his other hand, "When I tweak my body chemistry you wouldn't believe the energy I burn. Could you have a plate brought to me later too? I dunno if I can last until breakfast. Oh hi professors!"

Harry smiled at his teachers brightly, their slack jawed stares at him broken only when Slippy finished her work and popped away.

The scot was the first to gather a small portion of her wits, "Mr. Bones, what... I mean, how..?

Harry looked at them, a playful and satisfied gleam in his eye, "What? It could have hurt my friends."

* * *

><p>Before long, Harry found himself called in front of the headmaster with Professors Sprout, McGonagall, and for some reason, Snape in tow. Harry didn't want to be here, he found the old man suspicious, annoying on a personal level (he was privately convinced that whatever made his eyes twinkle had to be some form of dark magic), and it was not magically or physically possible for harry to have greater doubts about the man's intention towards the person of one Harry Potter. Everyone save Sprout he could really take or leave.<p>

On the other hand, Hedwig loved meeting Fawkes and being near him. From the impression Harry got from Hedwig, Fawkes was a lot like his companion. Dour, old, and possibly in need of a beating on general principle. She adored being in the old man's office because it gave her an opportunity to bother the hell out of the older bird by trying to share his stand, eating his food, or generally making a nuisance of herself. It wasn't often Harry could deny his companion anything.

"Harry, my boy, could you explain why you were found next to the body of a decapitated mountain troll, evidently mounting the head on a plaque with the help of a house elf?"

Harry was _sorely_ tempted to say he was engaging in the business of an ancient and noble house (because ancient and noble houses traditionally di a lot of business with trolls in girls bathroom's after hours). He really did love doing that. Laws were ridiculously unfair in regards to the old families and, legally, he didn't even have to identify which one he was working in the interests of. Wouldn't due for some pureblood prince to have to answer to the aurors after all. It was so stupid he couldn't help but love it. Sadly this wasn't the time.

"Well, you sent everyone off to their common rooms, but for the Slytherins and us Hufflepuff folk, our common rooms are in the dungeons that the troll was supposed to be in. Then every professor left all of us under the command of the prefects, who despite their authority are just students. I don't mean to brag," Snape looked like he was about to have a stroke at that, "but I'm very good at defense, between what I know from visiting the DMLE, what I know about anatomy, and the beautiful phoenix who is nice enough to follow me around I saw a way to both ensure the protection of everyone important to me and to expand my knowledge with practical experience. Besides, my mum taught me well, if you can do something in a dangerous situation to fix things, you do it."

Around the room the professors traded unreadable looks. Even Snape had something other than spite and his trademark scowl on his face, evidently the headmaster ordering the one group of people he actually cared about into danger didn't sit well. For his part, the headmaster sat behind his desk, unruffled and twinkling like the madman he was.

"Well, be that as it may, I must ask what spell you used to decapitate a fully grown mountain troll. That knowledge is not part of any of our curriculum, and assuming it is not dark magic of some kind is something that most assuredly must be shared for the greater good."

Harry smiled, now there was a statement he could really respond to.

"I'm sorry sir, that is a family secret."

The headmaster frowned at his cheek, and for an instant Harry felt pressure in his head. Unbidden, the memory of running at the troll rose in his mind's eye, with an intense focus on his wand and the spells he cast. The pressure seemed to press out from within, trigger an intense headache and pain behind his eyes, then Harry heard an enraged… hoot? What?

From her perch next to Fawkes, Hedwig cried out and flashed to right in front of the headmaster's face, catching is beard and all of his hair alight. Snape immediately reacted, shooting an _Augamenti _off at the older man, quenching the blaze, as the other professors looked stupefied at the phoenix, now snuggled firmly in Harry's arms.

There was a _very_ heavy silence before Harry spoke out in a clipped tone.

"Sir, I know you didn't just try to use a legilimency probe on the head of a Most Ancient and Noble House. I know that because if the Supreme Mugwump," Harry briefly thanked whatever gods were listening for his mum's desire for them to be exposed to everything the magical world had to offer, as well as her two weeks of hurried tutoring when they found out who he was, "tried anything like that he would lose his position faster than he could blink. I also know that because, if memory serves, there is actually a provision in the by-laws of the wizengamot that allows for the Chief Warlock to be literally drawn and quartered if he was caught doing so. I may be eleven, but being too young for occlumency doesn't mean I'm without friends looking out for me. I think I'm going to leave now."

Harry turned to see two extremely irate witches, each of whom had evidently picked up on his not-so-subtle hints and were not pleased with their conclusions. A brief but leisurely mental conversation later, Hedwig flamed out of the room, taking Harry directly to the Hufflepuff common area.

Harry flashed in just inside the entry to the common room, and unfortunately directly in the line of sight of what appeared to be a firing squad of angry female relations and friends. Neville stood behind the line, and upon seeing his friend unscathed, began smiling and fighting off laughter. Harry quickly asked Hedwig to flash them away, only to be laughed at as she flashed herself out to the grounds to go visit Hagrid.

"Traitor," Harry whispered, taking in just how much trouble he was in, and reflecting that he was doing better back in Dumbledore's office


	10. Chapter 9: Aftermath and Stuff

Chapter Nine: Aftermath and Stuff

Amelia Bones was an angry witch. She considered herself a top-notch administrator, a solid auror, an excellent lover when the occasion called, and an all-around powerful magic user. She had worked hard as the head of the DMLE, and after years of effort, she firmly believed that justice would always have a place here in magical Britain.

Which was why she was pissed, sitting in her office after hours with a half full bottle of Ogden's finest. It was Halloween, and she had yet to make a damn millimeter of progress on getting her fiancé out of jail. If that weren't enough, despite everything she had uncovered with her son's account manager, she couldn't begin to lay charges at the door of the man responsible for his years of suffering.

For Sirius, Amelia had firm evidence that her man was innocent. After a decade of questioning his conviction and not believing the status quo, she finally had proof! The problem was that in order to reopen the case, she needed to drag it in front of her bosses in the Wizengamot. Through established routine and the Wizengamot charter, she needed to present all of the case files, the new evidence, and the prisoner in question at the same time to open it as 'old business'.

Of course every one of the case files were in secure holding in the records department, sealed by the Chief Warlock. She could go in and see them, but they were warded against copy and could not be removed without the Warlock's personal authorization. It was idiotic, she could look at the files, compare evidence, confirm everything, but she couldn't actually do anything while the files were sealed. She had even gone as far as physically going to Azkaban herself, where the warden of the prison refused her visitation rights on the order of, you guessed it, the Chief Warlock.

The obvious solution was to just go to the Chief Warlock, but in this case the Chief Warlock was the same man that had thrown her husband-to-be in jail with no evidence or trial. Sure, she could try, but asking the great and powerful Dumbledore would tip her hand, and for a man of his influence arranging an 'accident' at a prison notorious for its poor conditions would be beyond trivial. Ol' albus wasn't even the only person with a vested interest in keeping the Black heir behind bars. Amelia, even as a student, had felt something was off with the headmaster, but now? After Harry and this business with Sirius? Amelia had a little bit more than suspicion regarding the man who she now thought of as 'that bearded twinkly-eyed bastard'.

The additions to the charter, as well as 'binding traditions' that defined how she had to prosecute these cases were a collection of changes made over the centuries by a score of people who were each tailoring the rules to suit their own needs. It was, as she and Andi often bemoaned, just more pureblood voodoo. If they didn't have so much invested here, if she didn't have Sirius here, if Ted wasn't buried or their kids raised on these shores, that had talked about moving to the colonies or down to Oz or something. Word was, there was less of the pureblood voodoo that made both of their jobs so much harder.

She had spent two weeks finding out how she couldn't just introduce exonerating evidence and get her man free again. Not even just for her sake, but the sake of her son. Two weeks wasted. The only reason she hadn't broken down and hexed the living daylights out of every gleefully uncooperative member of the records office was the same reason why she hadn't know these procedures before now. She worked hard to get the right man, and during her tenure in this position she had yet to have to overturn a case. She did things by the book, as crooked as it was.

She had spent the last six weeks working through two hundred years of laws, charter amendments, rulings, and in several cases plain old decrees. The magic user in her refused to accept that there was no solution, where there was a wand there was a way, but her work had revealed a maze that would drive a man with the stubbornness of a stone to give up, and even the heartiest genius to their knees. For the gods' sake, a number of the laws and loopholes depended on lunar and solar arrangements!

She just didn't have the time to keep this up. She had aurors and solicitors booked for a week straight following the three day break for All Hallows Eve. A small bitter part of her acknowledged that even Sirius, as carefree and rebellious as he had been (WAS, WILL BE, she had to remind herself), he would have been angry with her for spending two months neglecting her job for him. She hated that her time was legitimately too valuable to commit so fully to any one project like that. She had one last recourse, but it was an equivalent to the non-magical nuclear option.

She could go to the Goblins.

On a pad in front of her, slightly obscured by bottle and glass, was a pad with two clearly marked sides, Pro and Con.

Pro:

Goblins literally warriors of red tape

Harry's account assures best service

Possibility of _team_ working on problem

Possibility of Goblins finding way to ironclad adoption

Odds of snapping and murdering Dumbledore lower

Odds of Goblin stabbing Dumbledore higher

Con:

Possibility of non-humans destabilizing Ministry of Magic

Odds of Goblin stabbing Dumbledore higher (see above)

Amelia sighed and placed her head in her hands. This was the kind of thing that made her think even magic couldn't stop her from dying early of stress. Dark wizards had nothing to do with it. Her life would be claimed by stress and paper work before her reflexes died enough for some jumped up wanker to get the drop on her.

The poor woman spent the rest of the night finishing the bottle, and thinking on her issues. She wanted her fiancé back. She wanted her son's godfather back. She wanted... well she wanted a lot. Eventually, she fell asleep on her desk.

At noon the next day, there was a knock on her door that woke her. In a rush she cast a low powered _incendio_ at the paper with her list, and hurried swept the empty bottle and glass into a space expanded drawer.

"Come!"

The door opened, revealing the lined and oddly leonine countenance of Rufus Scrimgeour, head auror. The man stuck his head into the room, and with a curious sounding snort, stepped into the room.

"Long night, Amelia?"

"How did you know?" she responded, looking around her office. She may have been wearing the same robe as yesterday, but her office looked impeccable. She had taken care of the booze, and she had personally charmed her office to suppress odors of alcohol and not allow clothes to wrinkle. This wasn't the first time she had to take comfort at the bottom of a bottle during a long investigation. Amelia felt bittersweet for a moment. That particular set of spells she had actually picked up from Sirius before everything had gone to hell.

Rufus tapped his left cheek knowingly, and Amelia felt her face, only to find she had fell asleep on top of her quill, which had stuck to her cheek.

"Bugger."

Rufus smiled, "I'd chide you for your language, but I have a feeling you're going to be saying that again today."

Her face took on a concerned cast immediately. Things didn't get to her desk by being minor concerns.

"No, no, no, nothing that can destroy society before two, you remember the rule. No, this one is something that your son did. I remember H, good kid, I didn't know he had it in him, but..."

Rufus trailed off as he handed a file to the witch behind the desk, only for her to glance through it, and put her head in her hands again, "Gods damn it kid. This is why we can't have nice things."

"We got the report from McGonagall a few hours ago. Seems like she had to report it as deputy headmistress. I guess we should expect this kind of stuff from a kid with a phoenix, lord knows Dumbledore causes enough trouble. It looks like your son killed the troll completely on his own, assisted by his phoenix only. From the traces Flitwick picked up, it looks like he was running through a set of standard mid-range spells before he managed to decapitate it. I probably don't have to say it, but every spell he used was at least third year, and not even I know a spell strong enough to behead a troll in one go, that's counting dipping into some of the darker stuff I've seen."

Amelia's hands never left her face, as if she thought not being able to see the paper would make the report go away. If he didn't know better, Rufus would have sworn he heard her whispering vows to look at the adoption papers again and see if she couldn't do something about them. He took a seat in front of her desk, and waited.

Five minutes of bemoaning her fate later, Amelia was ready to go.

"Can I borrow Kingsley? He knows the kid and is more than enough to take care of this."

"Sure, but I'd rather just come with you," he responded as she stood to gather her coat, "I want to tell the kid to be careful personally. Much more of this and he'll find himself with an Order of Merlin."

As she left her office she scoffed, "Like he needs the encouragement. Kid's enough trouble as is, stupid loving your children."

* * *

><p>Harry woke up early, having set an alarm charm for considerably before breakfast. His sister, two closest friends, and two newer friends had all been... displeased... with him the night before.<p>

Susan and Hannah had gone for classic expression of sadness, worry and disappointment. Nym had physically assaulted him, which Harry felt was the best of the response he had gotten. Hermione had managed to quote, in one breath, every one of the eleven rules, traditions, statutes, and provisos he had broken. They were the worst.

Neville was angry with him until Harry brought him into the boy's room and showed him the brand new Troll-hide boots that he was proud owner of. Most folks preferred dragon hide as it looked better, but truth be told troll hide was nearly as resistant to offensive magics and made, in Harry's opinion, a much more handsome and manly pair of shoes.

The night before, when Slippy had interrupted the shouting and tears and brought him more sweet delicious calories, Harry had managed to talk her into making the boots for him and Neville. When he saw them, he stopped being angry and gave Harry a bracing and manly fist bump. The girls had followed them into the boy's dorm and been less than impressed by Neville's response. Their ire only increase when Harry showed them the set of (in his opinion) fine troll hide purse he talked Slippy into making for them.

Harry slipped quietly from the dorm and the common room, making his way to the kitchens. He was teaching dot, the surprising young head of breakfast operations, how to make his special waffle mix. It turned out the elves had never really considered using purees in their mixes, so his apple waffles were a huge hit when he had introduced them to his elven friend the first time.

The fact that being in the kitchen and sharing his recipe meant he wouldn't be at the Hufflepuff table for the fireworks the rumor mill would produce was entirely incidental.

Having wasted the whole morning and made his waffles in huge batches for the school, Harry helped clean up fully, and then began showing the elves the finer points of his method. He was halfway through showing how using an overpowered mincing spell could produce the apple puree faster than even the elven enchanted knife method when Drip and Drop, the brothers dedicated to answering the direct calls of the staff, and head boy and girl popped in..

"Harry! Old-beardy is callings for you!"

"He has a few peoples from the ministry!"

"Theys waiting for you in his office!"

"Please comes with us, Harry!"

The brothers, who Harry had a bit of experience with, loved alternating their speech. They claimed to have given the Weasley twins the idea. Harry, having met both pairs, felt like it honestly could have gone either way. He took off an apron and dusted flour off of his shirt and jeans. It was a Sunday, and he had been strongly hoping that he could hide from the results of his evening until he could use classes as an excuse to not attend meetings. If the ministry was there though, it meant mum, which meant this was probably going to be a very long day.

With a whispered request to Drip, Harry took Drop's hand and was popped away to just down the corridor from the gargoyle that hid the headmasters office. Harry walked the rest of the way, and just before he reached the stone guardian Drip popped in next to him and handed off a small shrunken package. If Harry had to attend a meeting with the headmaster for the second time in as many days, he could at least get a laugh out of it. His birth dad would have expected nothing less from him.

The gargoyle had evidently been expecting him, as it stepped aside as soon a he presented himself before it. Harry moved up the escalating spiral stairs and went to the door. He had enough experience at the door now to know that Dumbles had some way of knowing who was there before they knocked. It felt like a waste of magic to use it on something as lame as that, so Harry had resolved to go out of his way to be annoying and beat the old man to the punch. He crossed the small landing and knocked on the door as quickly as he could.

"Harry Bones here to see you sir!"

Harry didn't bother to wait for a response and just entered, looking immediately to the old man's face. He wasn't disappointed, as he caught a hint of an annoyed frown cross the man's face before he resumed his normal grandfather-y twinkle.

Harry scanned the rest of the room. Yep, his mum was here, along with Mr. Scrimgeour, Professor McGonagall, and professor Flitwick, Harry reflected that thankfully Snape was absent.

"Ahh, young Harry. I believe we can start. Minerva here has reported last night's event to the Department of Magical Law Enforcement as part of her remit as Deputy Headmistress. Your mother and Mr. Scrimgeour have come in their official capacities to learn of last night's events."

Harry looked around the room silently, trying to connect the dots. Dumbledore wasn't happy with the answers he got from Harry, so he literally ran to mum to try and get a different answer. Lord and Ladies above, the old man was seven years old if he was a day.

"Sir, Professors, Mr. Scrimgeour, Mum, I have had this conversation with the Chief Warlock already last night I gave more information than, technically speaking, I was legally required to. It annoys me to do this, but I must invoke the privilege afforded to the head of a Most Ancient and Noble house. What occurred between myself and the mountain troll, who I have been reliably informed was named 'Urg-rock!' was family business, and as no one else was injured or harmed, I am not required by any boy to divulge any information about what happened. Thank you all for your time here."

Dumbledore looked blankly at the child across desk from him, "You expect us to believe you were engaged in some form of house business with a troll that you decapitated. Within two minutes of meeting it no less? "

Harry smiled, "He was a very poor negotiator."

As the official statement portion of the meeting drew to a close, Harry slipped back into the persona of a guilty eleven year old and turned to the head of the DMLE, "With all that said and done, wanna join me for lunch since you're here mum? I have it on good authority we can get a shepherd's pie for lunch, and I know how you love that."

Harry put on his best puppy dog eyes which was actually pretty damn impressive for a budding young metamorph, prompting his mum to scowl and sigh. Scrimgeour to actually laugh out loud. Dumbledore looked like an annoyed grandfather, a look which everyone could agree didn't work well on him, and McGonagall and Flitwick both looked like they suspected this meeting was going to be a waste and they had given up their lunches for nothing.

Amelia promised her old friend that if there was anything important she'd share with him, and took her son out of the headmaster's office. Given the time, Harry figured they'd arrive just a hair too late for proper lunch, so he directed their steps towards the kitchens. Amelia was following him idly, and directed conversation to classes so far and how the family was doing. Harry was happy to fill in the details of how he met his god-brother and his only mildly annoying friend Hermione.

Amelia finally looked up and questioned what was going on when they got to the portrait of a bowl of fruit.

"Harry, why are we headed into the kitchens?"

"Oh, well I was halfway through showing the guys my waffle recipe, and I know they keep a bit of the food over after in case one of the kids knows where they are and missed lunch. They'll take care of us."

Amelia was taken aback by Harry's words. She knew where the kitchens were and knew it was staffed by elves. Being Sirius' girlfriend in seventh year guaranteed that kind of knowledge, she just didn't understand her son's words. The guys? Harry had always been close to the elves in the Ossuary, but she had thought that was just Harry being Harry.

"Harry, if we're going to be talking about things you don't want Dumbledore to know, why are we hanging out with the elves? You know they report to him, don't you?"

"Of course I do, mum. But elf business is kept among elves. Even if they weren't my people, they like me better than they do him. They'd take care of us," they had fully entered the kitchen now, and Harry called out into the kitchen, "Hey Pointy! Could you bring me and my mum one of the pies from lunch? We're gonna be talking about the whole troll thing. If you see Slippy and she isn't busy, could you point her my way too?"

The elf in question gave a small wave as he floated a meter tall stack of plates towards the massive cabinets that held the school's crockery.

Harry led his mum to the small table near the ever present fire in the heart of the kitchen. All around the mother-son pair a hundred elves went quietly about their business. The reflection of the fire glinted off the massive pots (each more industrial reaction vessel than cookware) that the elves used to make the bases for the meals. Hundreds of plates flew through the air, levitated by scores of elves through washing area and into piles for storage until the next meal. Amelia had been on edge for weeks, but even her nerves couldn't help but be calmed by the colors, smells, clinks, and clanks that all screamed normalcy and safety. The kitchens of Hogwarts held an ancient magic in themolder than Hogwarts and older than organized history. The magic of home, of a family gathering about a fire and breaking their fast, and harry wasn't hiding behind the overwhelming calm and safety of that feeling, no sir.

When she finally took a seat at the table, Amelia closed her eyes for a moment and breathed deeply of the air and magic of the place, more than even the feeling of the place, she was happy to be back here. She had dozens of memories of this table in this room, some more work appropriate than others, but all the same, it was like someone made comfort into a physical place. A tension she wasn't aware of carrying leached from her shoulders. As a pop sounded nearby and an elf deposited a pair of food laden plates in front of her and her son, she turned a gimlet eye on the boy across the table from her.

"So. Harry. We're going to start with what you were doing when you apparently hunted down and killed a troll, then you're going to explain to me why you know all of the elves in this supposedly off-limits place by name, and then maybe we'll move on to why they like you more than they like Dumbledore."

Harry quickly took a bite to get himself an extra second before he had to answer, and when he had thoroughly chewed his bite he swallowed and started, "Well, I think I know why the Uric guy who commissioned my wand was a master dueler. I looked into it a bit, and it looks like wand cores are usually a substance from a single magical being, more than one magical creature being use for a single core has a history of making a wand almost alive. My wand speaks to me, a lot like Hedwig does," Harry looked down at his food for a second, something very like confusion on his face, "Oddly enough, Hedwig agrees with it more often than not, but that's not the point. Everything I hear from it has been realy helpful so far, and I've been thinking that if Hedwig is okay with it then it can't be bad. But the more I listened to it, the more antsy I would get. Then Halloween. You know why I would hate Samhain. I may have only found out recently, but I lost a lot on that night," Amelia grimaced, she hadn't thought about that, Harry would be a little crazy the night he lost his parents, "and when Professor Quirrell came into the great hall last night yelling about the troll before he fainted, I just kinda snapped. The teachers told all of us to go to our common rooms, but the Slytherin and Hufflepuff common rooms are in the dungeons, and that's where Quirrell said the troll was. I heard all of that, and I figured out what the antsy feeling was," Harry stopped looking at his mum and began staring off into the distance, "The wand was giving me these feelings of blood-lust. It wanted me to go into combat, it wanted me to test myself against the troll, to protect my people, my tribe. So I did. And I could feel the fire in my blood, I felt the clash, the release from casting a spell, chain, I ran, I jumped, I tracked, I followed, and I fought. It was everything I needed, it was everything the wand promised it would be, I was worried about giving in to it, I knew I could hold off the feelings, but Hedwig agreed so I went for it, and it was glorious. "

Harry trailed off, still staring into the distance. Amelia was enraptured by his words. The lust for battle was something she had known when she had apprenticed to Mad-eye, and when she had led her team with Sirius and James against the death eaters when they started. She could remember feeling that way. Her mind before and after made sure that she had done right, that she had only fought the right people and for the right reasons, but in the moment it was the glory of war. The release of the endorphins Harry and Nym were always going on about. Hitting that sweet spot just at the base of a death-eater's _protego_, watching them trip and spill onto the ground, seeing red flush over the blade Sirius had always insisted she carry.

It was what Mad-eye, as he quietly confessed one night, kept living for, why he couldn't just retire. That feeling. All of the finest aurors felt it. She knew it, she had been one and she had hand selected every one of the ones to follow her. It was what kept a dark wizard catcher alive after twenty years of fighting the darkness, and it was what made dark wizards such a gods damned problem.

And her eleven year old son just described the feeling with the same clarity she could have. Fuck.

Harry met her gaze again, "I know how crazy it sounds. I was there, I mean I know how crazy it felt. I don't regret it though. Not for an instant. The club on that troll was probably fifteen stone alone. If that thing had been in the dungeons, if the 'Puffs had walked into it? I was careful, I was safe, and I had a phoenix telling me it was okay, and Hedwig even helped me take it down."

Harry put on a very mischievous smile, "I also have a kind of gift for you, I was really hoping you might put it up in your office? You know, kinda like mums in the non-magical world would put like pottery or something from their kids in their offices?"

Harry removed the package Drip had handed off to him from his pocket, placing it on the table next to them and casting a quick _engorgio_. The pocket sized trophy quickly assumed it regular proportions, and beside the pair soon laid a nicely mounted troll's head.

"Pleeeeeeease put it up in your office? Like right behind you on the wall? So it could be like staring down anyone that came in?"

Harry threw off his best puppy dog eyes, and Amelia burst out into laughter. Trust Harry to do something like this. Letting him have access to James' old journals had been a terrible idea.


	11. Chapter 10: Yule, a Dragon, a Unicorn

Chapter Ten: Yule, a Dragon, a Unicorn

It took two weeks, pairs of troll hide boots for all of the girls in his life, several dozen galleons worth of owl orders from Honeydukes, re-mounting and changing of the facial expression on the troll trophy (trollphy? Harry amused himself easily), and finally a number of bracing fist bumps and whispers of 'Women!' with Neville, but finally everything evened out.

Nym stopped hitting him on principle, Susan and Hannah stopped looking teary eyed whenever he entered the room, and Hermione ceased quoting his rules violations at him between classes. Harry could accept Nym, Susan, and Hannah, but the rule violations were getting to him.

Probably the only real change was that Snape had taken to sparing their class fifteen minutes of attention, mostly spent breathing down Harry's neck and critiquing his abilities. The friends reflected that he probably felt he was bearing down on a trouble student and showing him the weight his displeasure might bring onto rule breakers. Unfortunately for the long nosed man his comments, while petty, actually gave direction to their readings on the potions process. His attempts at being a jerk to Harry were actually helping the group's brewing process. All told, Harry had almost a decade's worth of experience shaking off actual abuse. A weird guy with a bathing problem and penchant for the dramatic (have you seen how he makes his cape swirl?) was more like actual child's play than any of the playing Harry had ever done as a child.

* * *

><p>Before Christmas and its accompanying break was the opening of the quidditch season, and of the group only Harry and Hermione found that they didn't care.<p>

Nym, Susan, Hannah, and Neville were all raised magical. Even Neville, who had spent the vast majority of his life hidden at his family manor, was a diehard fan of the sport.

The first game of the season, and the only game before break, was between Slytherin and Gryffindor. For the average game usually the crowd consisted of students from the interested houses, but there was so much enmity between the houses that the whole school showed up for the show put on by the snakes and lions.

This year they were not disappointed.

The snakes appeared to have no real talent for the game, instead they seemed to use physical assault as a game strategy. Thankfully for the audience, the Gryffindor seeker shared a skill level with his counterpart, meaning the kids got to watch a solid four hours of what Harry could only call a glorified blood sport.

By the end of the game each seeker had been unseated twice, the beaters had each managed a pair of black eyes, and the captain of the Gryffindor team had broken an arm. Even if magical people were twice as hard to damage as their mundane counterparts, studded bats and flying cannon balls tend to do the trick.

The game managed to lower Harry's already less than sterling opinion of the wizarding public.

The friends all did extremely well on their end of term exams. While admittedly Hermione did fairly well on her own merit, the rest of the group threw Harry a small party in thanks for his sharing the several hundred years of collected wisdom he had. Harry wondered if they honestly thought he would do anything else.

All in all, it was a quiet and simple run up to the Yule break.

* * *

><p>The kids made their way safely onto the gleaming Hogwarts express. As they moved through the small country station, they passed under the twinkling eyes of their headmaster. The nervous whispers of the upper years told the friends that this was something of a change. Evidently Flitwick usually oversaw the egress of the student masses to their home-places.<p>

A pair of gossiping 'Claws the friends followed suspected that it was because he was a dueling champion, and therefore best able to deal with any problems that may crop up. They went on to speculate why the theoretically more powerful Dumbledore had chosen to show up now but not in previous years. Harry tuned them out, his own suspicions coursing through his mind.

Dumbledore had been following the friends around a lot during the year. He had even sat through the back of a number of their classes. Harry knew perfectly well how much the man had seen fit to mess with his life, and he suspected that the old man knew at least one of the family names he had been hiding. Sadly it was likely the important one.

Harry knew he was protected by those same names to a great extent, and thankfully that protection was unlikely to go away. The old families all guarded their privileges jealously, and were each unlikely to vote to have any of the protections stripped from any family of similar prestige. It would set a dangerous precedent after all.

The worst the old man could do is try something for the Hufflepuff, Gryffindor, or Peverell titles, in which case he would be forced to reveal himself and put someone in charge of those seats in the Wizengamot. The Potter seat would be more problematic. Wizengamot records that his mum had dug up for him showed that the meddler had tried to get _Snape_ of all people put in as the proxy for the seat. Thankfully in Harry's absence the public had demanded the seat be held pristine in trust for him. The Wizengamot had carried that idea through; though it was likely they had done it so a new seat wouldn't throw off any of their precious alliances or voting blocs.

The train ride was uneventful for the friends, but it wasn't without its entertainment. Malfoy and Weasley were at each other's throats the whole ride, and there were no less than four different confrontations during the ride, each of which ended up being a square draw. The Weasley twins diffused one, and patrolling prefects caught the rest, but the bumbling power plays the two shared were hilarious. Harry was more glad than ever to be a Hufflepuff, no powerplaying, no fighting, just friends and getting work done.

Before they could get too bored, the train arrived at King's Cross and they met their folks. Harry felt Amelia and Andi looked resplendent in their troll hide boots and with their troll hide bags they seemed to be showing off to Madam Longbottom, the Abbots, and the Granger family. Harry decided to take the high road and stuck his tongue out at all of his female friends, not in the least because it seemed like Hermione and Hannah's mothers were expressing interested in getting a troll hide bag of their own.

The group exchanged pleasantries, and after a few people dropped hints about what kind of troll based gifts they would like to see under their trees, the group split and went home. This would be Harry's third ever Christmas, he was still getting used to giving and receiving gifts. The raven haired boy was thankful he wouldn't have to look too far.

Harry spent his break relaxing with his family. Hannah was over almost every day, like she usually was, and the kids had a grand time flying around the grounds of the Bones and Abbot manors again.

Harry spent a lot of time trying to convince his mum to teach him to aparate. Being the head of the Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, and Peverell families tied him into the ward schemes for all of their respective properties. Almost all of the founder's lands (the exceptions being lands long held under public trust) were hidden under heavy wards, and all of the Peverell properties were. The only way onto the lands would be for Harry to personally lead an apparition there, as none of the adults could make portkeys or aparate to places they had never been that were also warded, and a two week trip to get there normally just wasn't in the cards.

Harry had dozens of houses, with untold amounts of rare books, gold, strange artifacts, and dust lying all around them, and he couldn't touch a single one of them until he was able to personally aparate! It had been driving him slowly up the wall since he had identified the feelings he was getting from the wards. Amelia, despite what she knew could only be a wealth of knowledge (and just plain wealth), was unsympathetic.

The apparition debate was one they had been having since Harry was introduced to the wizarding world and the idea of teleportation. It was an argument so old and rehashed that Susan, Hannah, and Nym all prepared a scoreboard after the first year to mark down how many times each had won it. The score, it hardly bears saying, was heavily in Amelia's favor. Apparition was something that wasn't taught to kids because it was dangerous. The act itself was a witch or wizard essentially mentally ripping a small hole in the world and throwing themselves through another dimension to the place they had intended to reach. Until the rough age of fifteen, the magical cores of kids were unstable, and there were centuries worth of examples of what happens when an unstable magician tries to defy physics like that. The results were, more often than not, spread across several countries in ways that were both impossible to repair, and difficult to explain to non-magicals.

The kids showed the adults the journals and notes they had recovered from Ravenclaw's hidden study room, as well as telling them about the room itself, which after some small study had impressed the hell out of them.

Amelia and Andi both were slowly becoming numb to the things that their kids got up to. If it wasn't enough that Amelia had unknowingly adopted Harry Potter, it was the same killing a troll, or defying the laws of magic and common sense. Spend enough time in Harry's presence and you could become used to anything.

A trip to Gringotts saw Amelia and Harry both turn everything they had over to a team of Goblin lawyers. Both were incredibly frustrated, Amelia because her best efforts couldn't make heads or tails of the nth dimensional maze that was wizarding law, Harry because not even being the head of a Most Ancient and Noble House could get him his godfather back, or even the Order of Merlin removed from Pettigrew. General public knowledge had Sirius being ejected from the Black family by his mother, so they couldn't even play the ancient family name card that way.

Master Rel, having apparently gotten several promotions for the amount of business his accounts (read: Harry Potter alone) were generating, promised them the very best the Goblin nation could do.

Harry refreshed the family journal selection he had on hand, and they left the halls of the Goblin king.

* * *

><p>Shortly before the kids were due back at Hogwarts, Amelia cornered Harry for another talk like they had shared in the castle's kitchens. She was worried about her son. Harry was normal enough, well… Okay. Even in her head that felt like a lie. He was wizard normal at best, and completely bat-shit insane at worst, but as a mother she couldn't allow herself to think that about her son.<p>

She was worried about how much he identified with house elves, and she was also pretty concerned about whether or not there would be a repeat of the troll incident. Harry, in an unprecedented event, managed to assuage her fears.

House elves were born and raised to serve. It's what they did. They lived their own lives; they loved, lived, raised kids, and occasionally fell in battle against evil forces, but they primarily served. Harry told her about that, and told her about how he felt the same. No matter what mind healers said when he talked to them, Harry was who he was. His first memories were of serving, and he had been cleaning, cooking, and taking care of things for the _vast_ majority of his life. It wasn't a negative thing, it wasn't even a positive thing, it just was. He didn't make a big deal out of it, but most of the family's favorite foods were old recipes of his that he had taught the house elves, and on occasions, made for them. Harry's was the only room in the house that the elves wouldn't clean, and when he couldn't sleep sometimes, Harry actively assisted in cleaning the rest of the manor.

It took her a while to wrap her mind around, but she came to realized that her son just helped out. It was a thing he did.

Their discussions of his wand and the worrisome feelings it evoked were no less fruitful. Harry had spent some time thinking about it. Left to his own devices, even without the balance of a phoenix in the back of his head, he could resist the call to action. His need to go out and do something had practically disappeared in the wake of the troll incident, but having fully experienced it, Harry could feel the buzzing slowly edging into his awareness again. He could feel the call to arms slowly building in his blood. The pair agreed, if it got too much, Harry would let her know. The aurors had a few firing ranges and things where Harry could let off steam if it got too much, and overall they both felt concerned but better.

* * *

><p>With another trip to King's Cross, and another quarter day train ride filled with terrifying armed hormonal teenagers, the kids came back to Hogwarts to begin the second part of their first year.<p>

Harry and company resumed their standard operating procedure. Classes went by easily, the results from term testing showing the friends as ranking in the top of their year. They dug deeper into journals from Ravenclaw's hidden room, and Harry dug deeper into his family's own history.

It turned out that being insane was less of a Harry thing and more of a Potter thing. All of the pranking things his dad had gotten up to with the 'Marauders' were his expression of the family business. It turned out that no fewer than seven different Potters had been winners of the Triwizard championship. Seven of the eight most successful expeditions to find Atlantis had been captained by Potters or Potter ancestors. One Potter, to Harry's extreme amusement, had been a feared pirate in the Caribbean before declaring that stealing from the merchant marine was boring, whereupon he left that entire part of the world to go the steppes of the Mongolian highlands in search of the tomb of Genghis Khan's chief wizard.

Over the years the name Potter had been synonymous with the ridiculous. Potters had broken more laws of magic (if a few of the diaries depicting massive harems and orgies were to be believed, decency as well. It made Harry blush, and he had total control over all of his bodily processes) than any other single family. It was how they had made their family fortune.

Harry, given the life he had led up to that point, had never felt closer to his family. It was kinda nice to know that traditionally, his folks were just as crazy as apparently he was.

* * *

><p>School continued apace, right up until Harry went down to share an afternoon with Hagrid, only to find the half-giant's hut shut up tight and roughly fifty degrees inside. He had a massive fire running in his wood stove, and a large soup pot closed sitting in the middle of the blaze.<p>

"Hey Hagrid, were you feeling a mite cold, maybe?"

Nym had come down to see Hagrid with him as she shared Harry's interest in the big guy. The two quickly divested themselves of their cloaks, outer robes, and if dignity did not forbid it, Nym was considering her shirt as well. Hagrid himself was wearing the single largest short sleeve shirt either of the kids had ever seen, and was near constantly wiping his brow with a handkerchief the size of a small tablecloth.

"Nah yer lordship," Harry cringed slightly at the title, Hagrid liked bothering him with it, "I managed to find meself a genuine dragon's egg! I been look 'bout the library and found a few nice books, managed to identify the breed from the egg 'n everythin'."

Hagrid was easily the most animated Harry had ever seen him. If bouncing where he stood wouldn't result in hitting his roof, Harry thought the large guy would have been a blur of movement. He and Nym shared a look. They were currently in a wooden hut at the edge of a large and decidedly wooden forest. This wasn't gonna end well.

"I got me a Norwegian Ridge-back! Says in ole' Scamander's book they grow to a solid fifteen meters from tip to tip, an' they end up weighing sumthin' like twenty tonnes. Got a twenty meter wingspan too!"

"Hagrid, I don't want to be a buzzkill, but you're gonna be raising a fire breathing dragon in a hut made of wood. Isn't that one of those terrible ideas my friends are always warning me about?"

"Not even a bit! Since ye got me a wand, I've bin practicing. I got really strong flame freezing charms all around me place, I had Flitwick out here a bit earlier and he said he figured they was strong enough to resist a dragon. I even went to see Professor Bablin' and she went and gave me the right runes to protect sumthin' from fire. I been carving'em around me place and in all the trees 'round here. See, thought I'd do it all proper," He finished, grin splitting his face nearly in two.

"Okay, so you've protected your place and the forest around here. Have you talked to the folks in the forest though? Having a dragon around would affect more than just us. You were telling me that the centaurs don't like wizards mucking about in the forest, it's probably a bad idea to bring a dragon in without talking to them."

The big guy's face fell, "I didn't think of that. Firenze might hear me out, but Bane has been pretty angry lately."

Harry had a hard time denying any of his friends anything if it was in his power. He knew that a dragon probably wasn't a bright idea, but it was something Hagrid had been telling him about since he first met him.

"I'll tell you what, if I push for it, I can probably wrangle you a breeding license because you're sworn to my house. House Potter getting a dragon breeding license isn't that out of character anyway. If you can get the centaurs to agree to it on behalf of the creature of the forest, and if you can get them to agree to help raise it since I think a dragon might be a bit much for you to do on your own, I'll get you the license."

Hagrid swept the small boy up into a huge sweaty hug, "Yer a good man, Harry Potter! Yer a good man, thank you!"

Harry managed to pat the emotional man on the shoulder as he fought for consciousness inside arms with the literal strength of a giant.

Harry sent a missive off to Master Rel the next day, asking after the requirements for House Potter to acquire a dragon breeding permit. Across the country in a richly appointed office, deep in the marble depths of Gringotts, a Goblin looked at a letter from his client and couldn't help but raise an eyebrow and sigh. Something deep inside him was saying that this was a bad idea, but duty was duty. If Harry Potter decided that raising dragons was a thing wanted to do, Rel had no recourse but to help.

* * *

><p>A few weeks passed, and Drip passed Harry a note in Hagrid's distinctive scrawl asking to meet him as soon as he could after dinner. With Nym in tow, Harry made his way down to Hagrid's place to find him in his full dragonhide armor with a gigantic crossbow over his shoulder in front of his hut.<p>

"Harry! How ya been? I've been talking to the centaurs, and they agree that a dragon could be a powerful protector of the forest if'n it were raised right. They agreed to help me and to help the dragon on one condition, we gotta find and stop whatever's been going through the forest and killin' the unicorns."

Nym gasped next to harry, turning to him quickly, "Harry we have to help. There isn't anything more pure or more innocent than a unicorn, we've gotta help!"

Harry folded Nym into a hug, she looked like she needed one, and he turned to his big friend, "Of course we'll help, we'd help anyway if we could. You look ready to go to war there, what do you need from us?"

"Well, I left the egg with the centaurs, they been talking to it and tryin' ta teach it while it's still in tha shell. I know you kids are powerful good a' magic. Do ya think ye can manage a disillusion spell?"

In answer Harry pulled out his wand and looked intently at his enormous friend, before glancing at Nym.

She met his eyes, and gave a minute shake of her head. He grimaced and looked back to Hagrid.

"I don't think so, we're pretty good, but disillusionment takes a really precise amount of magic. We just aren't there yet. We'd likely mess something up and end up just melting or exploding you by accident. We can color charm all of you to make you better fit into the shadows, and a few silencing charms would probably do wonders for you if you're stalking in the forest."

Nym drew her wand resolutely and with a bump of her shoulder caught Harry's gaze again. Her eyes flicked between his and the not so distant forest meaningfully. Harry raised an eyebrow and when she looked firmly at him again he spoke up to his liegeman.

"If you want, we could come with you too. We've been working with professor McGonagall and we have gotten really good with changing our noses into something like a dog's nose, and changing our eyes into something that works a lot better in the dark. We could probably be useful. Combat spells are easy, thankfully, it doesn't matter if we accidentally overpower them."

Hagrid looked conflicted. If they were older he'd be asking, they wouldn't have to offer. But this was his lord, an eleven year old, and the son of the head of the DMLE. If something bad happened to the pair in front of him, he'd never forgive himself and Amelia probably wouldn't look kindly on him either. Harry thankfully took the decision out of his hands.

"You know that I take this stuff seriously. I can't in good faith let you go out there alone. I can handle myself," Hagrid glanced at his nice new pair of boots and nodded idly, "and Nym can too. We'll head out at the first sign of something we can't handle, but let us help. This is a unicorn we're talking about. It's worth the effort."

Hagrid gave a tight nod, and they started. The pair cast their spells darkening Hagrid's appearance and their own, and they tweaked their forms, making themselves taller and slimmer. They needed longer legs to stay even with Hagrid as they went through the bush and by making themselves unnaturally slim they made themselves easier to hide. Minor bone density increases and significant muscle density increases left them with a normal strength despite their new more odd shapes. They applied silencing charms, and Harry cast a modified bubble-head he had read about in Rowena's journals designed to suppress odors.

Nym and Harry both took deep breaths of the air, trying to find anything that smelled like blood. Neither had a lot of experience with unicorns in specific, but smell is a very primal sense. Anything that struck the lizard brain in the back of their heads as off was likely the correct trail.

The three set off into the forest, Harry and Nym sticking right next to Hagrid. By unspoken agreement, they knew they were good and could take care of themselves, but they were still first years. The company of a half-giant seemed prudent if nothing else.

After about a kilometer, they each caught something that stuck out heavily from between the pine and moss of the forest. Harry took point to guide them in and Nym stayed a step behind Hagrid as they moved deeper into the forest, heading rapidly towards a small pool of a silver incandescent liquid.

They reached it and Hagrid took a knee. He touched his fingers to the pool and rubbed them together, feeling the consistency of the liquid and taking a deep whiff off it. Harry just scrunched his noes form where he stood, Nym gave an almost unconscious nod of agreement. They could smell it fine from where they stood, it was pungent. And wrong.

Quietly Hagrid spoke, "Yeah, this is unicorn blood, no doubt. The centaurs tol' me that sommat in the forest been hunting them. they say they found a few bodies so far this year, each drained a' it blood."

He fell quiet for a moment, staring off into the distance, "Powerful stuff, blood of a unicorn. Ya could drink it and it would keep ya from dying, even if ye were on the brink of death. If it weren't freely given, you'd be cursed. Powerfully cursed. Every day you lived would be filled with agony an' fear. We best find what's been doing this right quick, anythin' desperate enough ta do this could do anythin'."

Harry nodded in comprehension and Nym tensed noticeably. At his glance she blinked and put on a brave face, nodding her readiness to continue. Harry gave his own in answer, and took point again when Hagrid stood and they started moving forward.

The pool of blood they found turned them onto the trail of the unicorn, leading them deeper into the forest. The magical beast left hardly any trail, even in its injured state it moved through bushes and across loose soil like the wind, leaving no sign of its passing.

Harry tracked the blood trail as best he could, which was the only evidence of the unicorn's movements. Drips, and pools where it stood and rested for a time, were the only concrete lead they had, and as they followed the brush became thicker. Soon the canopy overhead blocked even the light of the stars, and the three were left moving as quickly and quietly as they could through pitch black terrain.

They passed fallen trees by the dozen and moved over a stream, the farther they went the more they felt the gaze of the forest on them, the hairs on the back of each of their necks rising in response to movement they could only see from the corners of their eyes. More than once they would see eyes reflecting dimly at them from the black, stationary in the distance as if passing judgement. As soon as one looked away they disappeared.

At once the wind stopped rustling the leaves and branches overhead, leaving them in an unnatural silence as they continued following the trail of blood. It disappeared from view frequently, and the three could only move forward based on the now faint smell of blood and the pervasive feeling of wrongness that accompanied it.

Darkness, watchers, and the silence of the forest reached a climax, an ultimate crescendo where even the smell of the blood disappeared and the only thing that seemed to exist were the others they walked with. Harry felt Nym move closer, he could almost feel her extend a hand to hold his, the heat from her body fighting the chill of the forest enough for him to sense her close with him. She hesitated and before Harry moved to meet her halfway they saw it.

It appeared like lightning. A clearing opened up in front of them, moonlight drifted down from an opening in the trees above, and crouched at the glowing whit flank of a majestic horse was a cloaked figure. Wreathed in darkness and shadow, a worn black cloak dragging on the ground behind it, they could hear it feed as it hunched over it's terrible prize.

Each of the three's eyes seemed to slide off the thing, as if their minds were having a hard time seeing what was before them, or perhaps the horror of what was in front of them was just too much for them to grasp.

As the figure drank from the unicorn's lifeblood, Harry tapped Hagrid and Nym. In a whisper, "I go left, Nym go right, at the count of fifteen, Hagrid fire and we each _reducto_ it. Careful to miss the unicorn. Good?"

Two nods, and the count began.

By five Harry was in position, directly behind the figure.

At seven he could see Nym creeping into position, her movements unnaturally smooth as if she grew a few extra joints for the movement.

At ten, Harry could barely make out Hagrid fully unlimber the crossbow and take aim.

After five more seconds, there was a deep twang, followed by twin cries of _reducto!_

The crossbow bolt hit the figure in the shoulder, the force of the missile knocking it off balance and to the side. Harry and by some miracle Nym as well both counted on the figure to be knocked to the side, and soon twin blasting curses impacted the cloaked figure from the front and back, each punching a visible hole in the thing's cloak and aura.

There was a beat of silence following the flurry of attack, and then the creature released an inhuman cry, flying upward into the night. Harry fired off a trio of _reducto_s along the likely flight oath of the creature, hearing one positive impact, before the three converged on the fallen unicorn.

It's eyes rolled wildly about wildly, foam appearing at the edges of its mouth. Nym went to the head, approaching carefully to avoid the horn, and she began stroking and whispering calm words to it. Hagrid and Harry went immediately to the injury.

"This doesn't look good. We need to clean this and close it. If it loses much more blood I don't think it will survive."

Hedwig flashed into the clearing, alighting on Harry's shoulder. As soon as her talons found purchase on his shoulder, Harry visibly relaxed.

"Oh thank the gods, girl. How the hell could I have forgotten about you, I'm sorry, it was just really tense. Can you help us?"

Hedwig could tell that berating her wizard needed to wait; she gingerly took to the injured unicorn's side and began crooning. The unicorn had been calming slowly with Nym's tender ministrations, but as Hedwig began to sing it lost all the tension it had been holding on to. Thick, viscous, and pearly tears dropped from her eye to the wound in the unicorn's hide, it drew in a quick pained breath as its wound closed in a moment, the flesh knitting closed, leaving behind an ugly scar and a living unicorn.

Tentatively it took to its feet. The unicorn took a few steps, clearly favoring its side, before walking about the clearing normally. It walked up to each of the three speechless people, gently nibbling their offered fingers and rubbing against them. With a quiet wicker, it moved off through the clearing and out into the forest.

No one had words for what happened, so they remained silent. At his familiar's urging, Harry linked hands with the others, and they were flamed to right in front of Hagrid's cabin. The half-giant took his leave at his door and the remaining pair were fire flashed to the hufflepuff common room.

By that point, it was late and no one else was about. Without letting go of each other's hand, Harry and Nym shifted back to their base forms. Harry gave her hand a gentle and reassuring squeeze, and the pair separated into their separate dorms.

It had been kind of a long night.


	12. Chapter 11: The Inevitable, Really

Chapter Eleven: The Inevitable, Really

None of the three talked about their evening out. Hagrid mostly because he didn't have a lot of people to talk to and because it was business with his lord, Harry and Nym because they knew the results of sharing that particular story. Neither particularly wanted to bear Hermione's recriminations, Susan and Hannah's fear, or the stern words of their respective parents.

The quidditch season progressed, with their seeker (some guy named Diggory) leading them to victory over Ravenclaw and not much else. They had spent most of the year on it, but the friends pieced together the whole story of what was going on in Rowena's secret room. It turned out that none of the experiments she had running were particularly volatile, and all were well above the ability of a group of first years to figure out and finish.

They ensured that the notes on the experiments were marked and properly placed in her research journals, then put everything away finally.

Susan, Hannah, and Neville all seemed to be getting closer to one another. Harry suspected the girls liked him, and if his bright red face when they teased him was any indication, the feelings were likely mutual. It was a lot of fun to talk to Neville in the boy's dorm about what he thought of the girls, making him turn red and dissemble about his feelings. Neville hadn't had the same kind of upbringing that Harry did, but being stuck as the only child living in a manor house practically alone for a decade brought its own challenges. Harry may have known him for less than a year, but if he could help it in the slightest he would be there for his brother, if only to tease him about girls.

Neville's relatives had thought he was a squib (a term that had Harry wrinkling his nose, it was like being magical directly converted people into prejudiced idiots) and they had gone through years of forcing him into weird and life threatening situations to force his magic out. It wasn't abuse like Harry had suffered, but it walked the line pretty finely. The result had left a really nice kid without a hair of confidence in himself.

Meeting his god-brother and joining the family had worked wonders for him. His gran even let him come over to the Ossuary during winter break at one point, and they had all had an amazing time. Harry fell into a bit of a loophole as a head of house, he could actually use magic outside of school. They had taken advantage of it when Neville came over to construct massive snow forts for them to play around in.

Neville also delighted in playing the straight man to Harry's personal brand of insane comedy. It was a solid bonding exercise for the pair. More than once he had commented something like, 'Nice weather today, isn't it?' when Harry conjured storm clouds to follow the girls around and rain on them for an hour. He also delighted in messing with people by having Harry morph into his features, and walk around as if they were twins.

Malfoy had once accused Neville of being a squib loudly in class, only to spend the next three hours being chased about the school and hexed by Neville. When he went to Snape to complain, it was discovered that Neville had been with Professor Sprout in the greenhouses the whole time, asking extra questions about the fire-breathing dragon snaps they had re-potted that day.

All in all, they had a grand time.

The week before their final exams, Harry got confirmation via owl that House Potter was now indeed licensed for the breeding of dragons on British shores. The note included a post script with references to a number of good resources regarding breeding and raising a dragon, as well as a personal plea from Master Rel that Harry ensure that no one grew to regret the transaction. Harry couldn't help but smile, with _just_ a trace of mania in his eyes when he read it.

Hagrid was now, technically, licensed to breed and raise any dragon he wanted, though Harry intended to implore the man to not adopt another at the very least until Norbert (as he had named his scaled spawn) was fully grown and taken care of. The license was technical because Hagrid was oath-sworn to House Gryffindor, not House Potter. Unfortunately, Gryffindor was known as a long dead house, so if it popped up again out of nowhere asking for rights to dragon breeding it would get them, but it would also raise a number of questions Harry had no desire to answer. House Potter getting a license was much easier to hide, and also very much in character for the house. Since Lord Gryffindor and Heir-Apparent Potter were the same person, if someone so much as looked at Hagrid or Norbert sideways all he had to do was properly identify himself.

On reflection, it was stupid risk. This drastically increased the odds that he would end up having to reveal who he was. Harry had been thinking though. He _would_ be outed sooner or later. The ability to actually hide who he was for the seven years he'd be in the sights of the Chief Warlock was certainly beyond him. In the beginning he had been committed to hiding, but now he was no longer so adamant. It would come out when it came out. No sooner and no later.

As Harry was walking with Nym out to give Hagrid the good news, something changed. In the middle of a corridor that led to the entrance hall, Harry stopped dead. He didn't know what it was. Something was different. Nym took a few extra step down the hall before noticing that Harry had stopped. She turned in place and caught the searching expression on Harry's face.

"Harry, what's going on?"

He only raised a finger to tell her to be quiet, closing his eyes he tilted his head to the side as he focused. In Hogwarts different could mean dessert would be served first, or that there was a hellhound hiding in the next room. Knowing which was important. Something was telling him this was deadly-important and not fun-important. The part of his mind that was connected to his wand began sending signals, his blood pressure spiked and the buzzing he had felt in his blood before the Troll incident returned full force. This was big.

"Something's wrong, Nym, hold on."

The Hufflepuff and Gryffindor rings on his hand began heating up and vibrating slightly. With a moment's warning, Harry felt a foreign pressure wrap around his mind and squeeze.

Then Harry heard a voice, "_CHILD. YOU ARE NEEDED. WE CALL TO YOU THROUGH OUR CREATORS. EVIL IS INSIDE US. GO TO THE FORBIDDEN CORRIDOR, BREAK THROUGH THE OBSTACLES, DEFEND US AND OUR CHILDREN._"

With its message imparted, the pressure released, thankfully before the headache that normally followed could start.

Nym looked on her friend with extreme worry on her face. Harry was an odd duck, no two ways about it, but his practical jokes revolved around making people smell funny or rain clouds composed of roses following you around all day. He didn't do things like this.

She took three steps to get to his side and put a hand on his shoulder, shaking him gently from his reverie.

"Harry, H, hey, come back to me. I need you here, boy-o."

Harry's eyes opened slowly, "Shit. Nym, I think the castle just spoke to me. It said it came through the Hufflepuff and Gryffindor rings, and it felt like it did. I need to go."

He took a few uncoordinated and distracted steps back down the hall, before shaking his head. He turned by to Nym, "I have to go, the castle called to me, I need to go defend it," Nym immediately went to follow him, "No! This could be bad, Nym, I can't let you come, go get help."

Her face literally turned red as she responded, "Well suck it up, buck-o. I'm going with you. You need someone to watch your back. Besides, you know what mum, Hannah and Susan would do to me if I let you go off alone?"

Harry lost a little color at that, "Fine. But you stick right next to me, got it?" he was answered by a tight nod, " 'Kay, then we're doing this my way. Just like I told you about the troll, bone and muscle density increases, flood yourself with adrenaline and endorphins, and get ready to block off any nerves in case you get hurt. Got it?"

Another, if anything tighter, nod.

Harry answered with one of his own, and the two were off, like blurs through the hallways. Harry led the way to a little used moving staircase, the castle routed it up to the second floor and the pair rushed up it, taking the trick staircase hidden behind the tapestry of McDougal the Mild they hit the third floor left side in record time.

As they sprinted through the hall, Harry began firing off _alohomora_s at each of the door in their way, waiting for the quiet click that signified it had an effect. The door at the end of the hall responded, so the pair nearly tore off its hinges getting in.

As they entered, their hearts pounding in their ears, they came face to face with a gently snoring Cerberus.

"Why does this feel like another one of Hagrid's friends?"

As if sensing their presence the harp that had been strumming in the corner went dead, and the snores of the great beast began petering off. Harry immediately pointed to the open trapdoor near the leftmost head of the dog, and Nym preceded him in jumping through it.

As Harry joined her he subconsciously increased the density of the tendons in his legs as he lengthened the same. He had no idea how far the fall was, but his playing around with Nym had shown the upper limit they could do without being seriously hurt was around four stories in a dead fall.

He landed next to Nym a kind of leafy and vine-y bed. Harry was happy to note that she too had made the falling changes to her legs. They shortened their legs back to normal and looked around. There was no clear exit, but the vines all seemed to be creeping towards them.

Before either really noticed it, their legs were hopelessly tangled by the plant around them, and their lower bodies were in the process of being claimed. Nym looked to Harry in a moment of desperation, "Bugger. Herbology is Neville's thing."

"I take offense to that, I'm pretty decent with it too! _Incendio!"_

A stream of fire from Harry's wand shot from its tip like a flamethrower, burning away the plants trying to get control of his hand. He swept the fire around him in a circle, forcing the creeping vines to withdraw or suffer the fate of their fellows. A moment's work saw Nym free, and together they worked to find the exit.

In the middle of the room was another hole down, but thankfully with a visible floor a meter and half below. The kids dropped through and into the next room.

The room turned out to be the dead end of a long corridor. The wall were large stone blocks mortared together. It looked like the same architecture of the dungeons, but the hallway spoke of ages of neglect. Moss grew in the cracks in the walls, and there was a steady dripping coming from somewhere down the hall.

Harry and Nym advance steadily but with caution, Andi's favorite movie was Raiders of the Lost Ark, so the kids knew well what kind of things could be waiting for them in a place like this.

After three minutes walking, they came to a massive room filled with fluttering and... chirping? They shared a dubious look and entered fully, only to see hundreds and hundreds of what looked like winged keys, most perched on the many arches connecting the columns that held the roof. At the other end of the room were a pair of brooms, and a truly massive door.

The two approached the door only to find it locked. The intent of the room was obvious, catch the correct key. Nym's whispered _accio_ also showed them that whoever made this test or trap planned at least far enough ahead to make the answer not summonable.

Harry began examining the door as Nym started towards the brooms, only to be stopped by Harry.

"Wait, this is easier than that, come here, just _defodio_ around the hinge here. Screw flying, this'll be faster."

As the crowds of enchanted keys looked on, the pair of kids dug around the exposed hinges, and eventually let the door fall flat open.

"Wizards...," Harry said in disgust as they continued through, "Only a wizard would enchant a key and not think to secure the door."

The next room was a massive chess set with another obvious goal. They were meant to play through. Nym shouting _reducto_ quickly put paid to that idea. They continued on. A dead troll, ten minutes, and two gulps of potion later, they were in what looked like the last room in the dungeon they were in.

The final room was empty, and lit by massive fire running the length of the room at its sides. In the center of the open floor was a large mirror, and a be-turbaned man pacing in front of it. Harry looked at the mirror curiously. _Erised stra ehru oyt ube cafru oyt on wohsi. _The mirror of Erised! Helga spent a decade looking for this, something about enchanted passive legilimency. He quickly refocused on the man in front of it.

What the hell, Harry thought, who knew Quirrell was competent enough to even be capable of being evil?

Harry and Nym were both summarily bound and silenced. In retrospect, they both figured that being subtle as they ran towards danger was a good idea they both should have had. Overconfidence really felt stupid in retrospect.

Nym looked at Harry, eyebrows raised. Their mouths were uncovered, so she mouthed what looked like 'Well, fuck.'

Harry briefly entertained the notion of running through a 'Bell truck?' comedy routine, but Nym wasn't Neville and so was unlikely to play along. Also they were in life threatening danger or whatever.

The way Harry figured it, they had a few options here. They could test their transformations against the strength of the magical bonds they were in, which had a solid chance of freeing them both, but at the cost of a significant amount of energy and noise. Harry could try silent magic, which was incredibly iffy. If his core chose the moment he tried it to pulse he could end up exploding himself, cutting off his legs, or ripping a portal open to the outer darkness and letting one of the material representations of chaos through into this plane of being. There was a reason that folks weren't taught silent casting until they were past OWL age. Harry decided to put that one down as a maybe. The Potter blade, forged by the hand of the king of all the Goblins of Albion himself for Harry and his line down to eternity, would also really get him out of this bind. If only Harry had it on him instead of next to his socks in his trunk. He resolved to not make that mistake again too. This was turning into a big learning experience that he really hoped to survive.

As he thought furiously, Quirrell was talking to himself and gesturing with increasing vigor and anger. The silencing spell placed over the kids worked in both directions, so as they watched him talking they heard nothing.

A minute passed from the moment of their capture, then two. Quirrell looked like he was having some kind of psychotic episode, and Harry was approaching his decision. Quirrell had been stupid enough to bind them without disarming them, so he was just going to try a silent cast _diffindo_ and hope for the best.

He took a few seconds to move his wand experimentally and see what kind of range of motion he had. His quick test revealed that the bindings around him were so tight that all he could do was move his wand laterally a centimeter or two. It wasn't a lot, but it might be enough for a flick, which would help direct the spell. Harry drew a breath and closed his eyes in concentration, from a place deep in his mind he shouted the incantation.

The ropes around him parted silently and easily, he could feel that, so odds were the spell didn't go too far afield. He opened his eyes to see the rest of the damage. Beside him the ropes around Nym fell to the ground, and in front of him the turban around Quirrell's head also were rent in twain.

Nym took a step forward and fell directly on her face. It looked like the spell had cut all the laces on her trainers as well. Based on that, it looked like the spell had targeted any wound rope or fabric in the vicinity. Harry breathed a sigh of relief, given the stuff that happened around him the whole chaos god in the middle of Hogwarts thing wasn't crazy.

Nym regained her feet and the kids redirected their focus on the man in front of them, only to find something truly terrifying. Quirrell was on the ground scrabbling at the remains of his turban, and burned into what looked like necrotic tissue at the back of his head, was another face. A face with glowing, burning red eyes, nostrils that belonged to a snake, and wide smile. Staring directly at the pair.

The silencing charms fell, and the friends heard, "Ahhh! How good it feel to have the air plain upon my skin. Wouldn't you agree, Harry Potter?"

Somehow the exact same thought fell through the jumbles that were the thoughts of both Harry and Nym, "Aw shit." It seemed like it would be a night for cursing, linguistic and magical as it were.

Quirrell's body stopped its mad search for the remnants of his turban. The man's arms and legs both turned in their sockets with retch inducing cracks and pops. Both kids were physically capable of such a feat, but seeing a non-metamorph do it filled them with a strong desire to lose their respective lunches.

"Do you see what you and your petty low-born mother have reduced me to? I must live here, on the back of a dead man's face. Taking another's body, burning out another's core, just so I can walk again..."

The grotesque face on the back of the now former professor's head continued its somewhat mad ramblings. Harry, having seen a James Bond movie before, knew well what the walking remains of what could only be Voldemort was spouting.

"Argh! Here is my master plan, you're a fool, and I'll defeat you!"

Harry found that, in the moment, he was actually pretty disappointed that life imitated art. He met Nym's gaze while the Dark Lord waxed poetic. Harry twitched his head back towards where they came from and mouthed 'mum'. She inclined her head to the dark lord in the room, her brow indicating that it was a bigger deal than their mum. Harry rolled his eyes, indicating his wrist, and twitching back to the route they took in. Nym rolled her eyes, turned on her heel and left.

Harry redirected his attention back to the madman pacing back and forth.

"...POWER! In the end it's all about power. Those who seize it, and those too weak to do so. Your pathetic family was much the same, your mother had the greatest potential of her generation, your father had such power, but both were too weak to seize what they could have had!"

Harry paused for a moment to take in what he was seeing. There was actually a madman in front of him ranting about taking over the world. When did his life get so surreal? He wanted to blame Amelia, but she saved him so he couldn't quite bring himself to.

Sigh.

The question now was: should he act like a human being, or should he lean into the punch and go full wizard on this one?

Harry glanced at the mirror behind the crazy person in front of him. How was he going to get the idiot's attention? He just needed to keep whatever thing Voldemort here was after away from him and...

His appearance in the mirror looked down and removed a blood red stone from his pocket, before putting it back. Harry immediately felt a weight rest in his formerly empty pocket. Mother fucker! What was Dumbledore thinking? All you had to do to get what Voldemort was after was to want to keep it away from him? Harry didn't even know what it was, so he now had an unidentified magical object in his pocket being sought by a megalomaniacal self-styled dark lord. You literally could not make this shit up, he thought. Harry wanted to punch something in frustration.

Hey look, an evil wizard.

Harry focused, his eyes closing from the effort, every ounce of his attention moving down into his right arm and fist. His bone and muscle density across his whole body rested at a comfortable threefold increase over human norm, but with the magic he was pouring into his arm and fist it jumped to somewhere between ten and twenty times. He deadened the nerve endings all the way to his elbow, and on a whim transfigured his knuckles into brass.

After a brief moment of thought, Harry considered himself very lucky that Voldemort was entirely insane. If he was being serious about this, Harry would be dead. He had made a number of huge mistakes that Voldy didn't take advantage of. Maybe it was the fact that Quirrell didn't have a lot of grey matter to deal with in the first place, maybe being kicked out of a physical form did something to one's mental stability. Who knew?

Harry crossed the distance between them in an instant, Voldemort had never stopped pacing so he timed his move for the away facing part of his route. A single punch caved in Quirrell's face, broke through the possessed man's skull and stopped halfway through the head. Wherever his fist made contact with the now twice dead man's flesh, there was a fizzling and it seemed to be turning to ash. Harry wrote it off as the effect of the amount of magic he was pouring into his fist.

He removed his fist, and using his offhand _scourgify_-d his bloody hand. The professor's body lay on the ground in front of him, a black mist seeping from its pores and coalescing in front of Harry.

There was an ethereal scream of pain, and the mist seemed to sweep up into itself, then fly directly out of the room through a wall.

Harry sighed again. His mum was gonna be _so_ mad.

It took half an hour, but Harry caught his breath and brought his form back to human normal, repairing some of the minor damage to himself. With a sense of foreboding, he brought the body of Quirrell up to the school.

What felt like days ago, he and Nym had been leaving lunch to talk to Hagrid. A quick tempus revealed that dinner was now in full swing, so this was probably going to be good. Nym left to get Amelia, she probably went to Hagrid's place and used his floo, so if he was really lucky there would be a DMLE presence in the great hall. If he was unlucky he would be entering a hall full of kids with a dead professor in his arms and no reasonable explanation for how it happened. He did have an explanation, but nothing about a sentient castle alerting him to the presence of a dark lord who he killed with a single punch felt reasonable, even to him.

As it was, there were no aurors in the hall. So when Harry kicked the door open because his hands were full of dead guy, almost two thousand eyes belonging to almost a thousand kids turned to him.

_Poop-biscuit_ was about the only thought of any coherence in his head. Now it was terrible explanation time.

"Professor Quirrell was possessed by Voldemort, the castle directed me to him, we fought and I won. Ummm... He died."

You could have heard subtleties and nuances in the noise of a pin dropping in the hall.

In a strange turn of events, Ronald Weasley was the first to gather his wits (Harry wondered if that expression counted for a man without wits, but whatever), "Bones murdered a professor!"

"Did you not just hear me? He was possessed by Voldemort! I had to fight him at the end of that weird obstacle course on the third floor."

"Why should we believe you?"

Harry desperately wanted to sigh, but doing so again would make him feel like an emo and he wouldn't stand for that kind of behavior. He needed his mum, she was an adult who would listen to him and trust him. She also would run some diagnostics over the corpse in his arms before jumping to conclusions. Worst case scenario, she would make sure he got a comfortable cell while he was arraigned. This is really what you get when you listen to the mental projections of a sentient magical castle.

Now Harry needed a way to shove attention off the dead guy in his arms and what he freely admitted was his pretty clear guilt. There were a thousand people in this room. This could go south really fast, and not, as his mind idly noted, just because he was standing at the southernmost portion of the hall. It took a beat of silence for Harry's brain to kick in and realize the one totally true thing he could do to get himself out of this.

Maaaaaan, he really didn't want to do this.

In an instant he shifted his scar to his forehead, dropping the dead guy he was carrying he raised a hand to his bangs, lifting them to reveal the scar beneath.

"Why do you think you should trust me about killing Voldemort? I dunno mate, maybe because I'm Harry _Bloody_ Potter."


	13. Chapter 12: The Heat Thickens

Chapter Twelve: The Heat Thickens

Harry lowered his hand from his forehead, and the hall around him erupted in whispers. Behind him he heard footsteps from easily a dozen individuals. At the head of the hall, the staff table was filled with gasping and a truly maddening volume of twinkling. Harry turned, corpse still in front of him, to find his mum standing not five meters from him, arms crossed and an incredibly angry expression on her face.

This was gonna be a looooong night.

Aurors flooded the hall, as it turned out Harry's estimate of the number of people behind him was a tad low. Amelia ordered the staff rounded up and brought together in the antechamber at the end of the hall, directed what appeared to be a man cloaked entirely in grey to the body at her son's feet, and announced loudly that no student was to leave at the moment.

A pair of aurors were halfway to the staff table when Dumbledore stood and began, "I am Chief Warlock of the Wizengamot, Supreme Mugwump of the International Confederation of Wizards, and I demand to-"

Amelia shot in, a mild _sonorus_ giving her the edge over the older wizard, "And I am Amelia Bones, head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement. You'll find we're all equal in the eyes of the law," an auror came up on either side of Harry, one taking his wand and the other taking him aside, "A student reported that one of the professors had been possessed by the spirit of Voldemort, and I have just now witnessed my own damn son admit to having been involved in the death of a professor," the whispered _idiot_ under her breath managed to carry fairly well, "I am recusing myself from the investigation, but I am here to make sure that an investigation does take place and no one throws political weight around to stop anything."

The auror escorting Harry brought a son to his mum, and all around the hall aurors took position. Amelia cancelled her _sonorus_ and turned to her son, at a whisper that didn't carry, "I hear that the elves have shepard's pie tonight, why don't we go see... errr... Pointy and grab a bite while you explain to me why the hell Nymphadora ran into my office out of breath yelling about Voldemort before collapsing."

Harry barked out a laugh, "In my defense, I knew she couldn't handle the chemical changes and told her not to follow me. I'm kinda surprised she made it to your office. I know you said it was a defence, but the auror bullpen is a friggen maze."

Under light guard the pair walked down to the kitchen. Behind them a fourth grey cloaked figure appeared soundlessly net to the other three, and it too began waving it's wand over the body of the professor. Gender, race, stature, and identity may all have been obscured, but anyone could see the group looking confused and worried.

Among the students, Fred Weasley gave George Weasley a galleon, the final identity of the kid labelled 'Prongslet' having been confirmed and their yearlong bet completed. The exchange accomplished, the pair walked to the nearest auror to add their two knuts on why the former defense professor had a man named Riddle piggy backing on him intermittently.

The staff was less than pleased when confirmation came down that they had been working with Voldemort all year, and a few particularly mutinous thoughts at their boss's lack of reaction to the news.

* * *

><p>There were two more weeks in the Hogwarts schedule, and when Nym got out of the hospital wing the day after the big DMLE invasion (as the students were calling it), the friends got together again.<p>

It had become increasingly annoying to hang out in the library and in the 'Puff common room. No matter where they went Harry was surrounded by whispers, from both the 'he's a murderer' contingent headed by Ron Weasley and the 'he's a liar/coward' contingent headed by Malfoy.

It was unbearable to the point that the group decided to just meet in Ravenclaw's secret room. It answered whatever kinds of changes they wanted or needed from it, so in all honesty it was probably _the _ideal study place to begin with. They revised for their tests, and when those were finished and suitably destroyed by the collected knowledge of the friends, they spent time there to escape from the student body.

Harry was entirely unaffected by the stares and whispers, as was Nym, but the rest of the group was slowly going mad. It was well known that Harry was a metamorph, so they knew that he could be anyone at any time. In his stead the student body had taken to following and staring at his friends who did have a consistent form. Inside three days Neville was idly tossing about the idea of murder, by the time the friends were taking thestral drawn carriages to the Hogsmeade station even the normally passive Hermione was talking about setting the line on their reaction just on the other side of physical harm.

"I think stinging hexes are fair game if you hear your name in the whispers."

"I'm not sure if we physically contain enough magic to be able to do that and not be out with exhaustion by lunch," Susan countered.

Hannah tried the optimistic approach, "Maybe by next year they'll have calmed down about the whole Harry Potter thing."

Neville just laughed, not even bothering to shift his gaze from the window, "Calm down my as- OW! I mean I find it highly doubtful they'll calm down," he finished, looking at Hermione with a hurt expression.

Harry and Nym were competing to turn fingers into different metals, Nym winning with silver while Harry could still only manage bronze. He threw his lot into the conversation, "I don't know what your problem is, I don't get stared at."

Hermione turned a baleful glare to the boy, "Cheater."

"What was it I heard that Weasley twin say the other day," Harry countered, "If you've got it, flaunt it?"

She harrumphed, the friends laughed, Hedwig preened on Harry's shoulder in a smug way.

* * *

><p>The results of the DMLE investigation were just beginning to be felt. Normally incursions onto Hogwarts grounds were blocked by the Chief Warlock, and could only be done with the permission of the Minister of Magic himself. Minister Fudge had shouted a little upon Amelia bursting into his office, but had quickly added his consent to hers when he was informed.<p>

The Department of Mysteries had reported that the body Harry dragged up to the great hall had been filled with Voldemort's essence. Despite the hole Harry had left in the head, they found that it was in fact the body of Quirinus Quirrell. The face on the wrong side of the head matched pictures and reports of Voldemort during the war, and their investigation found that the way he had gained possession and changed the orientation of the limbs, Quirrell was completely dead before Harry took his body out of commission.

Their report had found traces on the body of a number of rituals, binding, healing, and strengthening. They found massive scarring all over the body, it had been hit with a large array of spell fire, not in the least the spells that Harry told his mum about firing off on a dreary night in the Forbidden Forest. The body had evidently been driven off by a number of unicorns before it could find one to feed, especially if the number of scars indicating it had been skewered were any indication.

The magical signature associated with the body had been taken by the DMLE investigators before the Department of Mysteries had taken possession of the body, and it had been tracked to a wide number of crimes and missing person reports along a near straight line path from Hogwarts to a forest long believed to be haunted in Albania. In fact, the deeper they looked into things, the more it added up. Voldemort had been reduced to a shade. Not living, not dead, less than a poltergeist, more than a ghost.

With Harry's permission, the entire investigation and the conclusion of it were all hidden under the umbrella of the affairs of a Most Ancient and Noble House. An unspeakable liaison agent, codenamed Wilhelm III, assured the DMLE that the Department of Mysteries would be continuing an investigation under their improved security standards.

There would be preparations, rituals researched, people trained, spells practiced. It seemed as though the Department of Mysteries would be recruiting for the first time since the end of 1981. Following the capture of Augustus Rookwood in the spring of '82, the department underwent a complete purge from the top down, resulting in the capture of two more death eaters and agents from the underground Bolshevik ministry and the wizarding corps loyal to the Peoples Republic of China. Due to their separation from the laws and procedures of the rest of the British ministry, they were able to snag everyone regardless of familial connections.

In every way the Department of Mysteries was the only place where preparations for a return by Voldemort could happen.

* * *

><p>The kids returned home for their first summer break.<p> 


	14. Chapter 13: A Real Surprise Party

Chapter Thirteen: A Real Surprise Party

Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore sat back in the chair behind his desk. It had been a tough year. His familiar jumped with a single flap of his wings from his customary perch to the old wizard's chair, butting his head against his master's in commiseration.

He reserved this time, the day after the students got onto the Hogwarts express and returned home, to go over the semester that had passed and evaluate all that had happened. In the last few years, he sat and had a small glass of fire whisky with his familiar. Why Fawkes liked the stuff he didn't know, but it was a treasured moment for the pair.

In the last few years, things had all been rolling up Dumbledore. Severus kept the den of snakes appeased. Albus let him go and subtly encouraged him in his favoritism and normal behavior. The odd compulsion charm kept him heading in the right direction, and kept the social atmosphere of Britain's young in line. Cunning and ambitious behavior was shunned, the ones nominally responsible for it were dreadfully out of practice. None of his students would rise to be real threats to his plans for the United Kingdom and its people.

He had managed to keep the lions down by placing people like Percy Weasley in charge, his careful pruning of the "world renown" (even he had to admire his public relations work sometimes) Hogwarts library kept the Ravens from doing anything of note. The Badgers were the only ones with any kind of competence before the 1991-1992 year, and he had managed to make them the universally mocked house. Even if people like Cedric Diggory were actually decent wizards, being Hufflepuffs would haunt their CVs for the rest of their lives after his careful preparations.

This year things had been different. The fiery drink he shared with his fiery companion was one of commiseration not celebration.

It had started at the end of July. The magic invested in the castle identified and sent off letters to every magic user in the British Isles on their eleventh birthday. He had pursued a strictly hands off approach regarding Harry Potter, his future weapon and martyr, since that delightful day in '81. Even so, He couldn't stop himself from waiting outside his deputy headmistress' office (many assumed his responsibilities had led him to give her so many of his duties at Hogwarts, truth be told the castle had simply stopped reporting to him shortly after a certain staff interview in '79), to see what mail she had to deliver on the Thirty-First.

She had no mail.

He watched her carefully every day for the next month, and besides the normal several letters to family's he knew of and muggleborns he would soon begin molding, there was no mention of the Potter heir. He had spent years making careful plans, Hagrid would take the boy to Diagon on the day the Malfoy's traditionally went. A disillusioned headmaster would follow and a few well-placed compulsions would ensure a confrontation. The half-giant would carelessly drop far too many hints about the boy to the public, and the seed would be planted for the first test he would give the boy of his abilities and feelings on Voldemort. The presence of the aforementioned dark lord had been assured with carefully planted tales of the elixir of life in the ears of an incompetent muggle studies teacher who had been persuaded to visit a certain Albanian forest.

But she had no mail.

Then there had been the whole deal with the sorting. No Harry Potter had been sorted, despite being called out. He had hoped that some minor mistake had been made, but no one looking like James or Lily had been among those to be sorted. Then Harry Bones made an appearance. Albus had been on the alert for the boy, anyone bound to a phoenix was to be watched, but he had taken an inheritance test (and how much work had he gone through to get those to fall out of style?) and was apparently the heir to a number of ancient families (and how the boy like to use it). Of course the boy had to go and be a metamorph, changing his appearance to look exactly like James had at that age, but without the runic scar that had been left on a certain small orphan's head.

He had his suspicions and wanted nothing more than to delve into the youngster's mind, but the boy's adopted mother had to be Amelia Bones. One of the only 'Puffs to overcome the world he had so carefully crafted. Albus dared not try to read the boy's mind now, not only was he sure to know of legilimency, but with a connection like Amelia, Albus would have to call in too many favors to work himself clear of the resulting charges.

Harry then turned out to do a veritable prodigy. As a metamorph, his excellence in transfiguration was to be expected, but when he turned around and excelled in charms, potions, and herbology, Albus didn't know what to do. History, defense, and astronomy were all joke classes, largely due to his influence, and the boy managed to do well in those too. He didn't even know where to start on Halloween.

The only bright spot was his inclusion of the muggleborn Hermione girl in his circle of friends. She, thankfully, could be read and influenced without worry. His readings of her during dinners and the occasional soon forgotten meeting kept Albus abreast of much of what the Boy was doing. Try as he might though, he could never seem to get to Rowena's secret room. He always seemed to get a room filled with chamber pots.

Then, as the year ended, the boy went and killed his little voldemort experiment. And revealed himself to be none other than Albus' own lost little boy. A whole semester of influence gone, and more than that, what he had thought of as him throwing a little weight around at some high-minded lost scion turned around on him. He couldn't hope to pull off the benevolent grandfather routine on Potter now.

A year that was supposed to see him 'rescue' the boy and cement some influence probably could have ended worse, but honestly he wasn't sure how. Albus raised his glass and took another bracing swig. Fawkes on the desk beside him dipped his head into his customized wide mouthed glass.

He would have to spend this summer re-thinking things. The long plan had called for securing and cementing his influence entirely in the boy for the next few years until he could get Karkaroff and Maxime to sign off on the tournament. Then Voldemort would rise and the game would be afoot once more.

Yes, he decided as he finished what would be the first of many glasses that night, he had some planning to do.

* * *

><p>Harry's first night back home was excellent. Before he had gone to Hogwarts he had two weeks as Harry Potter, and they were spent with his mum figuring out how deep a hole he had found himself in. He had been nominally free during yule break, but he had things to do then and limited time. Now he had two full months free to figure out what it actually meant to be Harry Potter. With some real time off, he could do now what he hadn't been able to since he found out his name, he could truly figure out who he was. In that vein, there was one free living person who could tell him about his birth parents and who could tell him about the life he might have had. Harry's summer project was to track down Remus Lupin. Harry knew his mum would understand. He was a Bones. He loved being a Bones. As long as he had agency in that decision (and by the gods that would be until he died) he would never change, but he was also a bit more than that. And he needed to figure that second bit out.<p>

It wasn't as if he hadn't learned some things about himself during the year, he did have most of the family journals after all. Potters had a kind of hereditary madness driving them all to what his father had called marauder-like behavior, and it turned out his bad hair was the result of an ancient gypsy curse placed on the Potter line in the early third century and not, as he had feared, merely the result of bad personal grooming habits. Gryffindor and Hufflepuff were each a kind of proto-potter, their combination firming what would become his own crazy line. His birth mum's journals had spoken of an uncle Harry thought had it right. He was keen on describing himself and what he called 'his kind' as too weird to live and too rare to die.

He needed Remus though to give him a living account of who he should have been, especially since the Goblins had reported no headway on the Sirius front.

The public would know soon, if they didn't already, that he was alive. Rather, he supposed, that Harry Potter was alive and active. Calling noble house privileges (and twenty-seven percent ownership) on the Daily Prophet had kept his name out of the most widely read paper in wizarding Britain, but with the child population of the same both owning owls and returning home, people would now know. He expected to receive a few hundred owls in the next few days. Owl redirection, really any kind of communication interference, was unfortunately one of the only branches of magic forbidden from even the old houses.

Messing with communication lines was forbidden by laws dating back to the time of Merlin and Camelot. Back then apparition hadn't been in wide use, there was no floo network, and portkeys were brand new. A single owl could mean the difference between life and death, or the start of a war, or even a blood feud. As methods became more sophisticated, portkeys were made easier and apparition safer, the advent of the floo network as well took most of the urgency out of most communication. The laws were kept on the books though, partly out of pureblood dogma, partly out of laziness, and partly because owl post was still a critical part of wizarding infrastructure. The ICW was funded mostly off breeding and training certifications after all.

When a week had passed and he only received notes from Neville complaining about the mail he got for knowing Harry, and Hermione thanking whatever gods were listening for a ministry ban on howlers to firstborn residences, his suspicions were raised. Amelia hit the DMLE books to find the correct diagnostic charms ( correctly identifying any form of cast magic, as a rule, being orders of magnitude more complex than the casting of said magic), and after performing them on her son found that he was under a number of significant post redirections and blocks.

Unless a person had personally met and been greeted by Harry Potter as Harry Potter, they couldn't send mail to him. Harry's eventual formal adoption as Harry Bones meant that list of people was further obscured, making the actual number of people who could send him mail boil down to his mum, Andi, Hagrid, and his five friends. The old Potter (and likely other, now that they formally knew who all he was heir to) blood wards made it potentially even more complicated, as intention based protections as old as the founders prevented anyone meaning him harm from even remembering who he was without a similar personal introduction. If the collected magic of Hogwarts wasn't stronger and more ancient than whoever had put the blocks on him, Harry likely wouldn't have even seen his acceptance letter.

They contracted out to a cursebreaker Master Rel recommended to break the redirection wards on him, but at the cursebreaker's direction, the family decided to modify the wards and not break them.

William Weasley, or Bill as he promptly insisted he be called, brought up the good point that as much as they may hate the fact that the wards were cast without anyone's consent, they had more than likely saved Harry from any number of cursed objects and kidnapping attempts over the years. Amelia could have kicked herself for not thinking of that. In all honesty, they had more trouble with illegally made and mailed portkeys than anything else. Not to mention the rather terrifying number of substances, even excluding active poisons, which could affect a person with only minor skin contact.

It would be difficult, but Bill worked out how the mail wards could be tied directly into the blood wards Harry had on him. The intention based warding could, with some tremendously complicated arithmancy, be brought into the redirection wards, making it so Harry could only receive mail that was incapable of harming him.

It took two weeks, but by the end Harry was more secure than he had been before. Bill refused payment for his services, the now outlawed family blood wards were extensive and outrageously redundant. The opportunity to actually study them would give him an edge in his own work that few could really hope to match. In his time spent working with Harry and the family, he also spent more than a few hours apologizing for his youngest brother. Ron, it seemed, was as much of a delight at Hogwarts as he was at home.

* * *

><p>When all of his mail and warding problems were resolved, it was the twenty third of June, and Harry began project 'Find Remus'.<p>

According to public record, the old werewolf had a strange and astounding last decade. After 1981, wherein all of his friends and ties to the world either died or were imprisoned, he spent two years as a shepherd for a mundane farm on the northern coast of Scotland before apparently becoming bored and seeking greener pastures of his own.

In the spring of '84, he moved back into the wizarding world briefly. Gringotts had a record of him going in as additional security on an expedition to find some of the ritual records left behind by Olmec wizards near the Yucatan peninsula. The expedition had run across an underground city filled with inferi animated by the very rituals they thought they were looking for, and promptly broke up.

There were records of a small business loan in the fall of '84 in the mundane world in central Mexico linked to him, where he evidently had tried to start a small professional adventuring business catering to Americans with more money than sense. By all accounts it went really well for him until he discovered during winter '85 that the majority of his clients were using him as a trainer for what they called 'private security' forces and what turned out was closer to corporation sponsored spies that needed the kind of training he gave his clients so they wouldn't die in the jungle ruins he led them to.

He went entirely off the grid for a while, but scattered reports of his whereabouts existed. Harry was thankful, for once, for the magically updating records available in the ministry. For a bit, there were portkey receipts linking him to travels around a few regions in the Himalayas known for their monasteries and martial arts. Later his records contained mundane governmental intelligence reports linking him to appearances in a number of freedom fighter training camps around the edges of the now former Soviet Union.

He apparently got tired of corporate and political games, as he reappeared mid-1989 in the magical world as a bodyguard for hire. His adverts for his skills were hilarious and impressive. It looked like Remus had contacted an advertising firm somewhere, as he included what Harry could only call glamor shots of himself posing in full dragonhide armor and armed with magical as well as mundane weapons. The impressive bits were the number of jobs and skills he had. Remus claimed to be familiar and proficient in the uses of a number of mundane weapons and explosives, as well as having knowledge and training in fighting styles and martial arts associated with cultures across both the mundane and magical worlds. He listed proficiency with a fairly wide variety of mundane transportation methods (how the hell he was trained in the operation of American built Chinook helicopters Harry could only guess) as well as ICW certifications in the creation of portkeys.

As far as Harry could find, he was out on assignment at the moment, working under contract with one of Britain's newspapers. Evidently the chief editor of _The Quibbler_ enjoyed searching personally for some of the crypto-zoological finds his paper advocated, and had hired Remus as a combination guide/bodyguard for himself and his daughter. The contract was public record, but they were evidently away as mail to Remus was returned with notes citing _The Quibbler_, and mail to the paper was returned citing that the staff was out on assignment.

His research, combined with his normal fun with his friends and family, kept him entirely busy right up until July 31st.

* * *

><p>July 31st, 1992, was going to be a big deal in the Bones household.<p>

Harry hadn't ever really had a birthday since he was adopted by the Bones'. They treated the day of his official adoption, September 7th, as his birthday for the last few years. In his whole life though, Harry had never had any real birthday. The Dursleys had never celebrated anything with him, let alone his birth, and as the person who cooked, cleaned, wrapped presents, and was more often than not physically assaulted at any party the Dursleys held, the idea of a birthday didn't mean anything to him.

This year Susan, Hannah, Nym, and the parents were bound and determined that Harry not only get a birthday party, but he enjoy it. Not only had the boy had a massive impact on all of their lives, but he had managed to take down Voldemort a second time in the past month or so, so as the family saw it, he had earned himself a hell of a party.

They planned out a day filled with what Harry enjoyed. The Family was going to go flying, they were going to spend some time in the main library of the British Goblins (Harry loved learning, and while the negotiations for the visit had taken several days of meetings, Amelia thought it was something that would actually function as a gift for a wizard with more money than he knew what to do with), and they were going to end their day with a long picnic at Stonehenge.

Invitations were extended to everyone Harry liked, Hermione, Neville, Hagrid, Master Rel, Chief Ragnok (who despite his station, managed to correspond with Harry at least a few times a month, evidently he had a soft spot for the young former orphan), and a host of house elves from the Hogwarts staff among others.

Best of all, It was a surprise. Normally it would have been hell keeping everything they were doing away from the normally observant boy, but with all of the permission papers Amelia had to write to get her underage son into the ministry records department, he was so distracted that he had no idea what was up.

Everyone was firmly resolved though, Harry's second real birthday ever would be the party of the decade.

* * *

><p>So it was that Harry was escorted into the ministry early in the morning on the thirty-first. They needed him out of the house at the beginning of the day so they could get everything together. Amelia had said she needed him for something at the office in the morning, and around seven Kingsley Shacklebolt popped over to the Ossuary and brought Harry over to the ministry.<p>

What no one had counted on though, was that July Thirty-first would be the third time in his life so far that the hand of fate would turn in his favor. Two years previously, a twist saw Harry adopted into a family that loved and supported him, and had the clout to see him protected even when he found his true identity. Later that year, fate had Harry looking in the right place, at the right time, to catch a glance through a weakened obscuration charm over a cracked window and witness the torture and eventual death of a phoenix.

Even among the people who knew this day was to be special, no one suspected that luck would find him again.

* * *

><p>That morning, curiously enough, Harry knew he was needed in the ministry, but no one had told him why.<p>

He woke early, made himself something small in the kitchen, said bye to Susan, Hannah, and Nym, (the latter two having slept over the night before) and met Shack at the door.

Whenever he went out these days, he took a different form. Since his stupid reveal of his birth name, the public had been clamoring for him, and he had no intention of being followed around by reporters. Harry honestly felt dumb enough trying to contact _The Quibbler_. Today he gave himself an extra foot and a half, light brown hair, and a plain, angled, no nonsense face. Folks knew he was a metamorph, so if this turned out to be part of the investigation of the whole philosopher's stone incident he could just morph back.

Kingsley approved of his face for the day, and apparated them both over to the ministry. When they arrived in the ministry atrium, his curiosity overcame him.

"Shack, why am I here, mum wouldn't say last night and she left before I was up this morning?"

The older man had to suppress a smile. If he knew his boss in the slightest, she hated being up early in the morning. His orders were to keep Harry out of trouble for a few hours and return with him around ten. Amelia was probably still under her covers snoring.

"I have no idea, kiddo. I'm just an auror, no one tells me anything," he smiled at his charge, "I'm just supposed to get you to the auror break room. They said if they needed you they'd grab you there, and if they didn't I'd come back and grab you around ten."

Harry took a book (he was through the founders and the Potter journals, he was up the Peverells and had Ignotus' journal on him today) from a space expanded pocket, "Good thing I'm prepared for a bit of a wait then, innit?"

They shared a laugh, and Kingsley led him to the room the aurors inhabited when they were trying to not work. He figured he should probably be watching Harry a bit more closely, but he had caught some pureblood jackass taking wallets and purses off of a group of mundanes with a switching spell the day before, so he had some paperwork to do.

The auror break room was a decently sized square room off the hall that Amelia had her office in. It shared a wall with the bull pen where all the aurors had cubicles, so as Harry grabbed a seat near the canteen area, he could her the quiet rumble of people talking and working.

He was going through the journal, idly taking note of some of the enchanting work Ignotus had done between hitting the brothels (the Peverell brothers had each been bachelors until late in their lives, and if their writings were any indicator, they had enjoyed that state thuroughly) and nodding politely to a few aurors as they passed through for tea or coffee.

A strange man sitting alone in the break room wasn't uncommon for them, most aurors met casual contacts in the break room so his presence went unremarked. Unremarked that is, until it hit a quarter to nine and a group of eleven wizards in battle gear came into the room.

The man who looked in charge of the group walked up to where Harry was sitting, "Hey, you the guy waiting for us? From the bust last month?"

Harry put his book down, "I guess, I was just told to wait here until someone came for me. Am I needed for more testimony or something?"

The man, a solid 6' 3" and lightly greying at the temples laughed, "Something like that. We're working a different angle today, I was told you might be here to help us."

Harry stood quickly, "I know how serious it is. This kind of thing should be stopped before it can crop up again. Just tell me what you need me to do."

Waving him along with the group the leader agreed, "You're telling me. Come with us to the briefing and we'll get it all squared away."

Harry joined the group of wizards as they left the break room and headed down the hall. They took a winding route out of auror territory and down to the Department of Mysteries level. The tenth floor was a single obsidian hallway with doors set at intervals for entrance to the various courtrooms and a single unmarked door at the end of the hallway for entrance into the DoM.

They passed through the entrance to the DoM and went straight through what looked like an operations briefing room, where an unspeakable stood at the end of a conference table next to a massive pensieve.

The leader, who had yet to identify himself, walked to the head of the room and slashed at the wall at the end with his wand. A large map of what looked kind of like a warehouse appeared in bright lines on it.

He started talking, "Alright everyone. We all know why we're here and what we're after. We're splitting into teams, yellow," he indicated three men close to the door, "red," three others waved, "and blue," three more men inclined heads at the leader, "I'm with the command team which is myself, Agent Nicholas II," the unspeakable waved cheerily, "and," he sent a questioning look Harry's way.

Harry started briefly, "Harry."

The leader nodded and continued, "Yellow breeches first, followed by red and blue," behind him on the map lines corresponding to the team moved into the warehouse from different sides and covered each of the rooms in turn, "command stays behind. When yellow, red and blue report clear, command moves in to take possession of any artifacts and debrief. Now let's get Harry squared with a dragonhide robe," He looked at him, "Just in case and head out, we know they have an apparition ward so our portkey leaves as soon as we're ready."

The guys from the yellow team took Harry to a room off the side of the briefing room and gave Harry a slightly ill-fitting and very thick full dragon hide robe. It was slightly too large, but as Harry understood these things the only dragon with skin this thick was a Ukrainian Ironbelly, the species whose hide could go as far as absorbing a hit from an unforgivable curse. He couldn't bring himself to complain, choosing instead to broaden and shirnk in a few places to make it fit better.

Their portkey was a long stretch of chain, and it activated as soon as they all made contact with it. Harry was subjected to the normal hooking and flying sensations. Portkeys took their occupants briefly through what firstborn researchers called a pocket dimension (Harry hadn't looked into it too much as he wasn't capable of it for a few years yet), the transition between dimensions being what jarred its users so.

The chain dropped the twelve wizards in front of what was now definitely a warehouse. It stood two stories tall and looked like something from a horror film. The walls were corrugated steel and the small windows set high into the walls had all seen better days. Harry wondered what kind of artifact a wizard like Voldemort would leave here, especially as the whole neighborhood looked like it was near a mundane sea port.

Yellow circled around to the back, Blue moved to the middle of the left side of the building, and red stayed near the three members of the command team. Agent Nicholas II (call me Nick, they had said) cast high powered disillusionments around Harry and himself (herself? itself? how the devil do you refer to an unspeakable, Harry thought).

The commander consulted a large pocket watch, and after about thirty seconds sent a look to the guys from Red team. One began a chant Harry recognized as the beginning of a temporary anti-portkey ward, and the other two counted to three below their breath before releasing a ribbon cutting spell in the shape of a crude gateway and a _depulso maxima_ at the wall next to the door to the place. The metal separated like tin foil and the banishing spell sent it in a clean chunk into the interior of the building.

The members of red team all ran inside after the portkey ward finished. Then Harry started in on the tensest five minutes of his life to date. Whatever old Voldy wanted kept away from people was something they needed, but standing outside a building of men risking their lives for it was a new experience for Harry.

He fidgeted. He ran through every defensive spell he knew, and began trying to think of defensive uses for others. He paced for thirty seconds before realizing it was making a small amount of noise, and settling on his haunches. He actually took Ignotus' journal from his pocket before realizing that not only was he invisible, the book was as well.

It was a long five minutes.

Eventually, a shout came back out from inside the building. Harry had no idea why an incorrect explanation of Gamp's third law of transfiguration was of any importance, but as soon as he heard it the commander stood from where he was crouching behind a massive spool of cable and started inside.

They passed through a few grimy hallways. On the inside the building was made of poorly fitted plaster boards organized into a few hallways around a large unfinished open area. As they made it inside, Harry found out why it was left that way.

The center of the space was absolutely free of rubbish, and had a set of massive rune encrusted copper rings sunk into the middle of it. In the center of the rings was a girl, she couldn't have been any older than Harry was himself, and she was attached to the ground by what looked like sharp and nasty black iron chains. She had beautiful platinum blonde hair, and not a stitch on her. Her skin was covered in small scratches and large bruises. When she looked up at the men surrounding the ritual circle she was in, a black eye stared defiantly out from her pale face.

A small voice came from her, and more than its words the tone spoke of disuse and abuse. It was enough to hurt the men gather around the edges of the circle, several of whom were fathers.

"Que faire?"

The sound shook the unspeakable from its place around the circle. Nick began looking at the rings and muttering to himself. His wand moved in small short jumps as magic began arcing from him to the rings, burning small runes from its surface.

She spoke again, "Que voulez-vous?"

The words stung worse than the waiting had earlier. He didn't know the words, but he remembered that tone intimately. It had been a few years, but it would be centuries before he forgot being that kid surrounded by people trying to hurt him. He didn't speak French, but in this case he didn't have to.

Harry looked at Nick, upon reflection, the only person whose name he actually knew there.

"Can I go in? What is it?," he said, gesturing at the circle.

The unspeakable didn't look up from the rings. He was on the third of five surrounding the girl, the two he finished with each torn from the ground and transfigured into paper for later analysis.

"Binding, you know why we're here. Give me a moment, aaaaaand yeah," he burned out a final rune on the circle, sparing a fast glance at the remaining two, "You can go to her now. I think it's safe."

Harry didn't waste a moment. Three steps brought him to her side, each bringing a distinct flinch from her as he took it. He settled on his knees next to her, and averted his eyes. He remembered being somewhere like this, and feeling weak. The staring hadn't helped him then and wouldn't her now. He summoned a newspaper from a corner of the room, and transfigured it to a set of large and thick robes, which he offered her.

Unseen by either of them, runes in the first and second rings began lighting up as he expended magic inside the circle.

She took the robe from him quickly, her hand darting out and snatching it from his. Harry took that moment to shift back to his normal form, and more than that, he waited for her to meet his eyes before slowly allowing all of the scars he normally hid to come back to the surface where they should have been. He wanted her to understand that he had seen some of these things, so he removed his battle robe (now far too large) and pushed up his sleeves, revealing evidence of some of his more painful experiences.

His left arm was a solid mass of scar tissue from midway down his forearm to his hand, remnants of one of the worst nights of his life, when Dudley discovered matches. Without constant low level use of his magic, the arm would have been almost too stiff from the scar tissue to use. His right arm bore a startling similarity to his right side, displaying the remnants of a number of ugly puncture wounds from thrown rocks, glass and other delights from his childhood.

Neither child heard it, but there were more than a few gasps when Harry shifted back to his base form, and when he revealed some of his own scars there were a few more.

"Er... je... m'appelle Harry."

She looked at him with some suspicion and with deliberate slowness said, "je m'appelle Gabrielle."

Harry stepped closer, and with a whispered _diffindo_ separated her from the dirty and terrible chains tying her to the ground. He turned to the commander, whose shocked expression still plain on his face.

"I don't suppose any of you speak French?"

His confusion plain on his face, "No, that was, well, that was your job. You're not the psychologist then are you?"

"Psychologist? No, I'm twelve, how the hell would I have a degree in psychology? And what does she have to do with Voldemort?"

The commander flinched instinctively, and looked more confused than before, "What do you mean Voldemort? We're here to bust up a ring of extra-national Veela slavers."

Harry looked down and rubbed the back of his head for a moment, "Shit. This is why being a metamorph can suck sometimes."

Shack told him someone would come for him, and these guys were probably told that some guy would be waiting in the break room. He certainly hadn't been the only one waiting there. How did he get himself into these things?

He turned back to the young, well, Veela he guessed. Holding out his hand, he indicated he would help her stand, "Umm... Aurors. Police?"

She seemed to nod and went for his hand, when several things happened at once.

British aurors weren't known for their competence. Sure, when politics didn't get in the way they usually got the right man, and with Amelia at their head they had managed to clean up most of the effects of centuries of nepotism and laziness. Not all of it though, which was how scions of noble houses who didn't know how to properly cast a _stupefy _occasionally got assigned to high risk missions like the one Harry found himself in.

One side of the ritual room was filled with stunned and disarmed bodies of the men guarding this place, most stacked in a small pile like cordwood. Stunned, that is, until a poorly executed stunner from blue team wore off. Disarmed until the man waking up grabbed his unregistered second wand from the disillusioned holster at his ankle.

Word travels fast through the criminal community, through necessity if nothing else. The now armed man sitting behind a crowd of aurors knew who this 'Harry' was, metamorphs being rare and metamorphs named Harry being decidedly unique. As Harry spoke to the commander and went for the hand of the Veela bitch they had been binding into servitude, he took careful aim, and pouring all his power into his spell aimed at Harry's heart and whispered _defodio_. Killing the boy-who-lived would see him put into prison for the rest of his life, but when someone inevitably broke or bought him out, he would have any job he wanted till he died.

Harry just made contact with the girl, Gabrielle, when the gouging curse painfully tore a hole through his chest and heart. It missed his spine by a pair of centimeters, but still managed to make mincemeat of a large portion of his upper chest as well as a disturbing percentage of his ribs. His blood sprayed over the girl and ground around them, soaking into the remaining ritual circles each of which promptly lit up like a Christmas tree.

As soon as his body found itself without an organ to pump blood, Harry's brain started firing in overdrive. It was a well-known response, when one's body knows it's going to die, it tries to pack the greatest possible amount of awareness and life into the time remaining to it. This physiological response is what is responsible for claims of seeing one's life flash before their eyes and similar claims. Thankfully, to a metamorph with as much knowledge of the human body as Harry had, that was all he needed. As the ritual circle flared into life around Harry and Gabrielle, he focused every ounce of his will and closed every vein, artery, and exposed piece of his insides to stop himself from just instantly bleeding out.

The human brain can survive for around a minute without oxygen before brain cells begin to die, a fact Harry knew very well. He need to solve this problem now, before panic or shock set in and he found himself well and truly screwed. Drawing on every jot of magical energy he possessed, Harry directed his body's entire awareness at the hole in his chest.

A universal truth of magic, and in fact most of human existence, is that you can't get something from nothing. Without eating several pounds of raw protein, Harry simply had no mass to work with. It was straight impossible for him to just make the damage go away. As his awareness and magic coalesced in his gaping chest wound, he proved the old adage true though, where there was a will there was indeed a way.

Usually Harry used a form of internal transfiguration to change his body, now however his energy funneled into an extremely intensive internal conjuration. He wasn't able to do anything as complex as creating a working heart, but skin appeared from thin air, covering the lightly leaking hole through him.

Closing the hole was exactly what he needed though, Harry managed to fully trap all of his blood inside himself, making it so he could afford to relax his control over every individual blood vessel across the hole and focus on solving his circulation problem. He ran massive changes through his circulatory system, creating dozens of small and simple muscle chambers throughout his body, decentralizing how his body pushed blood around. It was inelegant, ugly, an utter hack job, and left the preteen on the wrong side of magical exhaustion, but it would keep him from dying until he could get medical attention.

It was a fight that felt like it lasted for days, but Harry saved himself from dying for the next few minutes at least. A part of him that Harry felt should have been a lot smaller was surprised he was going to make it. When he finished he brought his awareness outside his body to the room at large. He had collapsed into the arms of the tiny Veela he had been trying to help. She had her forehead pressed against his and was whispering to him.

"S'il vous plaît être bien."

Around them, the circles Nicholas had been breaking were engulfed in a holocaust of jade flame. The fire was translucent, and seemed to be burning closer and closer to the two of them in the center. Harry saw it coming, but having just solved one life and death struggle, found that he didn't have it in him to be worried about a second one so soon.

Outside the fire, Harry could barely make out six different men in the process of re-stunning and binding their prisoners. The roar of the now chartreuse flames overwhelmed the sound, but Harry could see the commander looking entirely too frightened and in an argument with the unspeakable. He was the one in the fire, he should be excited about the whole deal, not the commander whose name he still had not picked up. Well, Gabrielle should be concerned about the whole deal too. Wait. Gabrielle.

Harry shifted slightly, putting a small space between them and looking deep into her eyes. He may have thought this was about Voldemort, but honestly he was okay with it ending up being about saving her. Here she had suffered god only knew what, and right when he was trying to help her he went and got his blood and guts shot all over her. And now they were going to be burned in some kind of green ritual fire. He was the worst rescuer ever. Using all his will power and every remaining flake of power in him, Harry lifted his hand and gently brushed a lock of her hair away from her face.

"Hey, sorry about all this. I didn't mean for this, I don't actually think I was even supposed to be here."

She jumped a bit when he spoke, but for the first time seemed to understand what he was trying to say. Harry could feel the fire begin to lap at his extremities, and from her face he could tell she felt it too. The fire felt like it was burning more than just the physical, Harry could feel the fire magically, as if it was burning through his mind as well as his body.

Gabrielle hugged Harry tighter to her chest as more and more of the pair caught fire, each of their awarenesses closed down to just the other as the fire came closer. She put her head against his again and whispered in his ear, "Eet iz okay, Harry. You tried, no?"

The last thing either thought before losing their battles against injury and fire was wonder about how and why she had spoken her last words in English.

* * *

><p>At eight that evening the dining room of the Ossuary played host to a curious and entirely unique congregation of power.<p>

The head of the DMLE sat at the head of the table, to her right was the king of the Goblin nation of the British Isles. Across from his King sat the head librarian of the same Goblin nation with a spread of keystone books linking him to the collected knowledge of his domain. To the librarian's right sat the oldest house elf anyone present had ever seen. The sheer number of wrinkles on Hogwart's head elf's face made him look more like a Shar Pei puppy than a nearly three hundred year old caretaker. Rounding out the set was a high ranking unspeakable, who introduced itself as Agent Imhotep.

The topic of the conversation was how what should have been an epic birthday party for the defeater of the darkest wizard to have lived in the last half dozen or so centuries had ended for the birthday boy in grievous personal injury and a wholly unknown bond to an eleven year old Veela.

A number of people were unhappy.

Amelia's voice, filled with quietly restrained rage, started the conversation, "How the hell did no one even ask for a last name when they picked up my son? That was a high security operation to bust a ring of some piece of shit slavers, and my son managed to just waltz in without anyone blinking. I know he is a metamorphmagus, but… just what the hell?"

The unspeakable fidgeted quietly in its seat, "Our man on the ground made a large number of mistakes. The operation was under my department's supervision so Nick should have confirmed everyone's identity and been more careful, per procedure. Their pre-mission brief took place on the tenth floor and none of the wards around our department tripped so he assumed that everything was in order. Apparently our wards don't cover the case of well-meaning mistaken identity. If Harry had known or even suspected that he wasn't supposed to be there we would have been notified, but Harry thought he knew what he was doing so no ward tripped and nothing happened. We're working on filling the hole in our security, the use of an imperius could theoretically duplicate what happened."

"Griffy wants to know what Harry did to survive injuries. Griffy hears from elves at wizard hospital that he is safe now, but Harry's body is missing his heart," said the wizened elf.

The librarian (His actual name, Shal'kek-Nogorob, translated into English literally as 'The Librarian') perked up at the house elf's question, "I actually have been in contact with the healers at St. Mungos, the nation offered the services of a few of our best and I went there to keep record of what happened. It seems like young Harry was hit with a rather overpowered gouging spell, which cut a chunk from his body, pulping his heart, a large chunk of his upper body, and causing damage to his lungs and some of his upper digestive system. When he arrived the scans run on him showed that he still had a large chunk missing from him, but had managed to seal off his lung damage and appears to have created a number of small heart-like blood pumping chambers distributed through his body. His work appears to be enough to keep him alive while he recovers from the exhaustion he placed himself in by keeping the damage at bay. The examining healers all agree that his fixes were crude, but when he fully recovers if he can refine the system he made, Harry should find himself entirely immune to any form of massive trauma like this again. No higher life form has such a system, so it's efficiency is unknown, but some cave wyrms have a roughly analogous system. We have furnished what information we can."

Amelia and Ragnok each looked sick at the description of the damage Harry had sustained. This would be the second time in his short life that Harry had survived what amounted to a death curse. Even in the historical records that Harry and Nymphadora spent so much time studying there had never been a case of a metamorph surviving so much damage.

Amelia shook the painful images from her head, and heaved a sigh, the librarian continued, "He is stable now, and that is what matters. Evidently the healers have him pumped full of regeneration and nutrition potions. His magic seems to be slowly continuing the work he started. It defies even the nation's best knowledge of the subject, but Harry looks like he should be back on his feet in no more than a week."

"Do we know anything about the ritual, or his bond to this Gabrielle? My men are attempting to track down who she is, but the bastards we caught seem to be protected by unbreakable oaths to one another, and because she's a French national and can't be released to them yet we're running into trouble," Amelia asked.

Ragnok shook his head, "We're attempting to identify her through our French counterparts, but we're running into similar walls. Public inquiries into missing person reports with the French ministry are also being stonewalled. Either she is just some random child and the French are being difficult, or given how completely we are being blocked out she is related to someone very big. Until she and Harry can be safely separated, or Harry can travel with her to France, we're stuck."

"Can they even be safely separated? What do we know about the ritual?"

Imhotep sat a bit straighter, "You all probably know how much of a role intent plays in all rituals, well it goes double for binding. Our agent dismantled a significant amount of the ritual environment before Harry unknowingly activated it, unfortunately that only served to make the final result of the whole thing more unstable. It's difficult for us to truly define how the two kids are linked at this point. From what we have seen, the binding wasn't meant to involve blood of any kind, and it was saturated with the magic-rich blood of a metamorph. That blood alone is enough of a free agent in the whole deal that we can only guess what the result is. I have a full team working through the arithmancy of what happened. We know what was active in the circle before he made magical and physical contact from pensieve memories, and we have a small sample of his blood that we can evaluate. It's an immensely complicated process, but we may have an idea in a few weeks. Honestly, when Harry recovers and the two can talk to us we'll have a much better idea of what is up. At the moment they are both in identical magically induced comas, and when they are not in physical contact both of their vital statistics start dropping."

The house elf stood on his chair, giving him an extra six inches and calling attention to himself, "Griffy thinks he may know something. House elveses know a lot about bindings. We's all need to be bound to people or places to have magic, so we has much experience with it. Normally when bad people try to bind Veelas they use a slave bond. The bonder person wants to enslave, there is being an act of control. When Harry cut her chains and offered her robes, thats opposite of control. His magic started ritual with acts of compassion and freeing. Griffy think if theys be bound, it's because the little girl wants to be bound. Griffy spent time with Harry at Hoggywarts, Harry powerful, but not enough, Griffy thinks, to have done all he did. Harry had to conjure parts for himself on the inside with no wand, and he had to conjure a lot of parts. If Griffy had to guess, little girl bound herself to Harry and gave some power to him so he could save himself."

The rest of the group exchanged thoughtful looks. That would explain a lot. The need for a physical connection between the two was something that wasn't common to any binding ritual, legality aside, that any of them were familiar with. If Gabrielle had forged a magical connection to Harry to share power with him, it made sense that they would need to keep a connection going so their cores could stabilize after having been drained.

The Librarian passed around a few of his keystone books paged to similar historical examples, and the group spent the rest of the night trying to find parallels. By the time they separated, no headway had been made.

It looked like they were just going to be waiting until Harry and his new friend woke up.


	15. Chapter 14: Best Nap Ever

Chapter 14: Best Nap Ever

Depending on one's your perspective, the estimate put forward by The Librarian for how long it would be before Harry was back on his feet was either spot on or off by a week. Even decades later the best conclusion Harry could reach, regarding not just this event but really most of his life, was that magic was a funny thing sometimes.

Harry and Gabrielle lost consciousness when they were fully engulfed by the flames of the ritual they had inadvertently begun. When it finished moments after they both passed out, the members of Red team brought down all of the transport wards around the warehouse and immediately portkeyed the two unconscious children to the ministry's DMLE emergency ward of St. Mungo's Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries.

Healers began scanning and diagnosing mere moments after the pair arrived. There was a major panic among the on call staff when the first round of scans showed that the kids were each magically exhausted to a dangerous degree, and what's more the boy was actively missing a heart in addition to a significant internal chunk of his upper torso.

They started a controlled version of absolute 'the sky is falling' terror. Skin was present over the whole wounded area, and once a gentle cleansing charm was applied, it was clear that no blood was escaping the injured region. Instead, there was a void inside the boy's body where a heart, a number of bones, and the upper portion of his left lung should have been.

The longer they stared at Harry and attempted to figure out a course of treatment for a straight up missing heart, the lower his vitals dropped. The longer they worried the worse he got. Eventually the senior healer on the ward declared that they needed the boy in an observation room so they could get more precise information about what was going on. They dumped Harry into the gurney occupied by Gabrielle and one of the junior healers ran them down to one of the hospital's intensive care rooms. When they ran more diagnostic charms on him in the new room, they found he had actually gotten better since the last scan. When the results repeated themselves over the next half hour, only getting worse for the five minutes Gabrielle was removed from his side to be changed into hospital garb, they found their pattern.

Amelia was soon by her son's side, a breathless auror having sprinted from the Department of Mysteries to her office. She watched as the magic of the observation room had quills moving back and forth across a ream of parchment. Each new line was watched with equal fervor by the medics and the mother. The full list of her son's injuries was staggering. Of interest to everyone though was how his body seemed to be stitching itself back together, slowly to be sure, but none the less on the macro scale and in real time.

In the end, they filled Harry full of skele-grow, muscle, and organ regeneration potions as well as a few blood replenishers for good measure. They saw the changes He made to his body to survive the damage he took, near two dozen new and small muscle chambers lined the major arteries of his body, forcing blood along his circulatory system. Evidently his body considered that state his new normal as the potions seemed to be regenerating into it. The healers, concerned parent, and after a short while, collected friends, could only sit back and wait.

What they saw wasn't necessarily all that was happening though.

* * *

><p>As far as either of the two kids were aware, they regained consciousness about four hours after they passed out. Gabrielle must have come to first as Harry woke to a gentle mental poke.<p>

He felt like he mumbled and turned a bit, and when the poking persisted he woke fully, sitting up and looking around.

Harry was sitting on an island of grass, a small tent lying to one side with a cheery fire burning in front and what appeared to be a large bush covered in yellow blossoms being the only occupants beside Gabrielle and himself. The island couldn't have been more than a hundred square meters, and seemed to be floating in the air. Clouds passed slowly and silently around the spit of land.

It was a place that reeked of peace.

"Where the hell are we."

Coming from Harry the way it did, it was more resigned statement than question. An answer you have to have, but don't really want.

Gabrielle understood, and her reply was simple, "Oui. Merde."

The pint sized Veela was seated cross legged next to Harry as he woke. The boy soon stood up and left her side though, taking a quick walk to the edge of their apparently floating landmass to see what kind of environment they were in. There didn't appear to be any kind of ground, or any kind of bottom, beneath the kid's floating island. Their only company in the sky, a set of clouds moving seemingly without wind and in opposing directions.

Harry returned to his spot near Gabrielle, "I don't suppose you know what's happened?"

He spoke with a half-grin. This was honestly par for the course. Being jaded to the weird was something that came with the life he led. For her part, Gabrielle seemed to feel a similar way, though Harry could tell a lot of it was bravado for her, "Non, I woke up here just a few moments before I woke you up. It does not feel like real life though."

Harry agreed as he poked and prodded at the skin covering where his massive wound should have been.

"Do you think we're dead?"

The light in whatever place they were glinted beautifully off of her hair as she shook out a negative, "I do not think so. I think we activated the ritual those dogs were preparing. Obviously we changed many things though."

Harry looked at her curiously, "What do you mean?"

She had to visibly steel herself to answer and Harry felt an intense compulsion to hug her and try to relieve some of whatever terrible thing she had to be feeling, if it was what he feared, that might not be welcome though.

"Those bastards kidnapped me. They took me from my mother and father. I hear your police officers tell you, I am Veela. What they were trying to do was a kind of binding ritual, I think. Like a permanent _imperius_. They would have... sold me. You and your police stopped the ritual, but when your blood spilled out in the circle, I think we completed what they began."

As she gave her short account of what she thought happened, before his eyes, her skin took on the bruises it had back from where they had been before they woke up here. She hugged her knees to her chest, and soon her clothes disappeared again like they had outside wherever they were now, ritual paint appearing smudged in places around her head.

Harry saw how beat up she was, and he recognized it. He had those wounds too once. The shape and angle of some of them were exactly the shape of some of the scars he still carried, the kind you got when you were assaulted by more than one person and were trying to fight back. She was strong, he could tell in an instant, the fact that she sported wounds like the ones she had and was still put enough together to talk was damn impressive.

Harry cast around for anything he could use as a blanket or a handkerchief for her, he wanted to be able to do anything to make her feel better, but had no idea what to do. As he looked around, right before his eyes appeared a soft blanket. He stood and grabbed the (conjured from nowhere?) objects. Gabrielle cringed away at first, but he put the blanket around her and got the handkerchief into her hand.

"I'm sorry. For whatever its worth, as much as I like the fact that I don't have a big hole in me in this place," he glanced about, afraid for a moment to tempt fate by citing his no longer missing pieces but nonetheless resolute, "I would do it again as many times as needed to try and make you safe from that."

Gabrielle practically leapt from beneath her blanket to Harry, bringing her arms around him and hugging him for all she was worth, "I know, Harry. I am Veela, I can tell. It is why I chose to complete the bond with you. You cut the ties from me to the circle, I was free. When you were hurt though, I could feel your magic calling out for help. I finished the ritual on my end so I could give you some of my magic to make you safe. I cry because I am afraid, for you and for myself."

Harry quickly responded to her hug with a fierce one of his own, "It will be okay. Wherever we are, we're away from that scum that tried to do that to you, and we're together. We can survive this."

Gabrielle started a less tense and somewhat relieved chuckle, "Here I am hugging you, you saved me and I saved you, and yet I do not even know your name. You cannot be just Harry, no?"

They gently disengaged from their contact, somewhere in the hug her clothes had reappeared, and the bruises all over her disappeared again. Harry laughed a bit as he answered, "It's kinda funny you should ask that. My full name is kinda complicated, it turns out I'm the last of a bunch of family lines, I'm Harry James Gryffindor-Hufflepuff-Peverell-Potter-Bones. Technically I'm a lord three times over and an heir once. My sister is the heir to the Bones line. I was adopted into it after my mum found out how my old family was abusing me."

Gabrielle looked amazed for a moment, "Wait, Harry Potter? I was saved by Harry Potter? I saved Harry Potter? Mon dieu."

It had distracted her further from how she had been feeling a few moments ago, so Harry was more than willing to absorb some boy-who-lived crap.

"I'm guessing my reputation precedes me."

"Oui, you are famous across the world! Did you not know? The Dark Lord had many followers across the world. Since his fall we have done much to clean our system, but we still remember what you did and what you lost with his death," Her face was a mix of adoration and seriousness. Harry thought it was still better than most brits, few of whom ever remembered what victory had cost.

Gabrielle shook her head, as if to clear thoughts of him from her head before she introduced herself, "I am Gabrielle Victorie Delacour, my father is Jean-Pierre Delacour, French Minister of Magic, my mother is Appoline Aimée Delacour, daughter of the matron of the largest Veela clan in Europe and Asia," then her mind caught up to her mouth, "... wait... abused?"

Harry gave a short laugh, he had half hoped that one would slip past her. Deciding to just go for broke (he was apparently stuck in an inexplicable location with a girl he had inadvertently engaged in some kind of bonding ritual with, really what could he lose by letting loose at this point?) he returned all of his scars to their correct locations. Harry went to remove his shirt to show her some of the finer points of his childhood when his shirt disappeared. Gabrielle gasped, bringing her hand to her mouth.

"I'm a metamorphmagus. I don't know if the news internationally carried that. For some reason the magic won't let me just get rid of my scars, so I move and compress them into the small of my back where they usually go unnoticed. I brought out some of the more visible one earlier to try and show you that I've been through some tough times too," Harry trailed off, more than a little embarrassed by the patchwork of scar tissue covering his body.

"I didn't and don't want to minimize what happened to you, but if you want to talk, I think I'll understand. I recognized some of those bruise patterns, I saw them often enough. There are only so many ways people can try and grab your arm and hold it behind your back after all."

It came out bittersweet from the boy, like a sour nostalgia. Gabrielle felt she understood. Even if magic let him make them go away, Harry would carry those scars until he crossed over to the other side. His shirt reappeared after a minute, and she offered him her hand. They spent a time sitting in companionable silence.

* * *

><p>Eventually, they figured out they were inside one of their minds. As Harry figured it, it was either a mindscape of some kind, or they had an extremely powerful and bored cabal of wizards messing with them. The accepted theory was Harry's mind because it seemed to respond better to him, though Harry preferred his conspiracy ideas. They figured it out because while they had no empirical measure, time seemed to be wonky, daynight cycles could be a moment, or it could feel like a week. The two teens spent a long time getting to know one another, and attempting to figure out the bond they shared.

Something about it drove them to be in physical contact near constantly at east for the first few 'weeks' they spent in the mindscape. As near as they could figure it out, the ritual had been a kind of super powered unctuous unction designed to make the subject trust the caster implicitly in all things, and what's more obey them, likely as a part of some kind of preparation to eventually put Gabrielle into the black market Veela trade. The only thing they could come up with was that it worked both ways on each of them, their being relative strangers and talking intimately about how each had been abused for example. It had turned into some kind of sharing, each seemed to be able to borrow energy from one another in small amounts.

Gabrielle laughed when Harry said he was considering charging rent for his mind space. His wand was likely the bush Gabrielle identified as sweet wormwood, and his connection to Hedwig was definitely the fire, as it occasionally trilled happily at them as they whiled away time.

While they were in mindspace, they never seemed to get hungry, or to need to use the restroom. They were freed from temporal needs, and both found the experience confusing in the extreme. To combat their boredom they started expanding the island and making places to play. A massive jungle gym covered a square kilometer of island, Gabrielle created a replica of the house she lived in with her family, Harry did the same and they each gave the other tours.

Gabrielle talked a lot about her grandmother's village and what it was like to be part of a Veela clan. It was one of the most unique experiences she had, and Harry ate it up. The clan was very tight knit, marrying or dating a Veela resulted in an introduction to the clan and its matron, regardless of the Veela in question. So many people in the past preyed upon them as a group that the clan had a lot of protection built into it's culture. Over time their desirability turned them into a race of warriors to fend off unwanted advances. It was a somewhat awkward conversation, but Gabrielle used her memory to draw up some of the cave paintings that were the Veela races' primary historical treasures.

Her memory of the paintings was detailed, and Harry was awed by the depiction of winged women hunting, fighting, and defending themselves. Some of them were pornographic, which drove Harry to blush and Gabrielle to laugh. Veela were practically unknown in the UK, which was why Veela slavers went there. Its hard for a population to notice the capture of a specific kind of woman they have never seen before.

Harry told her about the family and his mum, Gabrielle talked about her sister, her parents, and her aunts and uncles in the clan. They talked about Hagrid, and his fascination with critters that would eat and disembowel anything smaller than him. Gabrielle told him about how much trouble her sister had with her allure at Beauxbatons. She confessed her worry over how her own allure would affect her when she came into it fully. Harry talked about Voldemort and how unprepared he felt. He showed her the memory he had of fighting him and expressed his concerns regarding an enemy that was less sane than a meth-riddled starving ferret on a hot tin roof.

Then they moved on to more fun topics. Harry showed her memories of flying, of Hedwig and her fire travel. Gabrielle showed him the joy of growing up with christmas. Her memories of birthdays growing up and holidays with her family.

They had a good time, but with all their construction and projections over time they both felt weakened. After they spent a few 'days' constructing the pyramids from Gabrielle's memories, they reached the conclusion that building things was draining magic from them in the real world, and probably why they had spent so much time in this place.

By mutual agreement, they took down everything they had built, and shrunk the island in the sky down to its original dimensions. As they let their collected energy build back up to non-coma levels, they traded books from their memories, and taught each other their respective languages. Gabrielle had picked up English quite easily from Harry's mind it seemed (she quietly suspected that their sharing was biased in his favor, servants needing to understand their master more than the reverse, but she didn't want him to feel guilty), but they were having a little trouble with Harry's French.

By the time Harry was getting near a fluent level in French, they could feel their magic stretching toward a critical threshold. They'd be waking up soon. The amount of time they had until they hit that point was arbitrary. If either felt like it they could probably extend their stay in Harry's mind for another few weeks, but having spent what felt like several months just hanging out in each other's company and getting to know one another, they were a little eager to get back to physical existence.

The working plan was to get Gabrielle back to her folks as soon as possible. She didn't have a strong grasp on time, especially after having spent a number of subjective weeks in Harry's mind, but she knew her parents were going beyond spare looking for her. The British having her would only make it worse, the mundanes weren't huge fans of one another, and with the French 'purebloods' having mostly been done away with during the revolution, the tensions were if anything higher between the countries.

It was something she and Harry had discussed in the mindspace. With everything that had happened to her, especially on British soil, it wasn't crazy that France would call for official censure in the ICW and get it. The Brits were self-absorbed enough, as a rule, for that to not mean a lot. Unfortunately the one man it would mean something to was Harry's headmaster and who already had an unhealthy interest in him. It would be a fun next few days.

They felt closer to wakefulness. The mindscape around them got hazier. They lay down between the bush and the fire, each closing their eyes and with a final squeeze of their hands, they both transitioned back.

* * *

><p>The first thing Harry felt was the low pulse of the small hearts he had made so long ago. He didn't quite have a consistent pulse anymore, and he felt sure that blood pressure just didn't mean the same thing to him anymore. He rolled his neck, releasing a thunderous series of cracks into the room. Harry took the next moment of peace before the healers, his friends, and his folks came storming in to take stock of his limbs. Only then did he realize that he still had something in his hand. Looking to the side he saw Gabrielle, looking just as radiant as she had in the mindscape, her hand in his just as it had been when they left the mindscape. Her dark blue eyes, two round sapphires glinting with mischief and amusement, met his for a moment. She squeezed his hand as the door to their room opened admitting an army of concerned healers and well-wishers.<p> 


	16. Chapter 15: Complications and Stuff

(A/N: Most of the french I use is my best guess from cross-checking between different translation sites, and in all honesty I straight don't have the patience to keep doing that for dialogue. In this chapter, if it's in italics, not clearly an incantation, or not clearly marked as a thought, it means it's in French. Points if you get the reference I used in Jean-Pierre's cursing.)

* * *

><p>Chapter 15: Complications and Stuff<p>

The St. Mungos DMLE ward was in chaos. It lay on the lowest level of the hospital in the farthest back corner of the building. Space expansion rune arrays and charms ensured that there was never a shortage of beds, but the ward itself was designed to be small, secure, and impossible to access without official notice. It was a design choice that was perfect for taking care of injured convicts or ensuring the safety of witnesses. It was, however, not designed for crowds of well-wishers or parents attempting to get to the side of their recently kidnapped offspring. To it, and its designer's, credit it was an excellent ward most of the time, some things were just difficult to compensate for.

Harry and Gabrielle woke together in an observation room. Within seconds of their regaining consciousness, healers were swarming the pair, wands firing off diagnostic spells like they were going out of style. The room had been tracking their progress towards recharging their cores for the last six days. There had been a noticeable jump in the last twenty four hours in the rate at which they were regaining energy, so most of the senior staff looking over their case as well as Harrys family and Gabrielle's investigator were all ready for them to rejoin the world of the living.

Being a metamorph, Harry was always acutely aware of his body and how he was doing. He and Nym hadn't gotten sick in over a year because of how close to their biological processes they had become. Having spent the last... Harry had to pause for a moment as he considered how much time exactly had passed. They experienced at least two months inside his head. Maybe more? Keeping calendars hadn't been a priority. How much time had passed on the outside? At any rate, having spent the last arbitrary chunk of time stuck in his own head, he was even more in tune with the center of his being than normal.

With his hand still closed gently around Gabrielle's, and a set of four healers all asking him questions and scanning the daylights out of him, Harry closed his eyes and sunk his awareness into the physicality of his being. Where before he had been purely in his mind, completely disconnected from his physical form, he now immersed himself in the feelings of his body. It was glorious; he had underestimated how much he missed his body.

The rhythm of his hearts (was that what he was going to go with? Hearts? What do you call distributed blood pumps? Harry couldn't help but think that nomenclature blows) was slightly off, a few of the pumps in his lower body were slightly out of sync with the rest, so he lined all of the timing back up. His body had taken the nutrient potions and the skele-grow and used them to regenerate the ribs that had been injured as well as the part of his lung. The hearts he had set up had become easily half again as large and powerful as he had made them in his moment of emergency. Harry silently thanked the gods for non-specific regeneration potions.

The fucker (guy, man, or person, Harry amended internally. Susan and Hermione both would be after him for his language, regardless of his terrible disfiguring injuries) who had got him had been lying down and in front of Harry at the time, so the blast caught him heading up and at an angle. It destroyed his heart, passed through the upper part of his left lung, and exited through his shoulder blade. The potions had repaired almost all the damage, but Harry could feel something very curious in his internal structure now. His magic had evidently decided that having a single large heart in the middle of his chest was just a liability, so it hadn't guided any of the potions into replacing the destroyed organ. He now had a space in him that was just sort of... empty. It was weird. Other than that though, he was in pretty good shape all things considered. He thanked his lucky stars that the blast hadn't caught him in the spine. That would have been difficult verging on impossible to recover from.

Maybe that would be his next project with Nym? Transfiguring pieces of themselves into inanimate things, like his literal brass knuckle trick, was interesting and had been their project well into the summer. Now that he was thinking about taking damage on the scale he had, working on a redundant nervous system would also be a really good goal for the pair. The new project would actually not be too far away from what they had been doing. Transfiguring the animate flesh of their bodies selectively into the inanimate was actually simple, but painful. Animate to animate, human to animal, human to super-human, these didn't destroy nerves, they changed the form of them but they didn't make them end suddenly or disappear. Duplicating, deadening, or otherwise manipulating the nerves was the majority of the issue after the power intensive but straight forward task of transfiguring the flesh to metal or any other inanimate material.

Harry lost himself in his musings and the sensations of having a body again. His ideas about the routing of bones and nerves in the damaged area carrying him well through the scans of the healers present. He was brought back to reality immediately though as a small piece of him in the back of his mind screamed in frustration. Harry squeezed Gabrielle's hand again. Now that they were back out into the meat space (what else could you call the opposite of mind space?) it seemed like he had an open connection to her like he did with his phoenix, who knew he and Gabrielle were fine the whole time and was currently out in the lobby with his mildly panicking mum.

While he had been being scanned she had a single healer, a translator, and an investigative auror questioning her, likely because he had been admitted with a missing organ and she with bruises and cuts. From their time together in his head, Gabrielle could speak English just as well as Harry could. The auror and translator were being less than sensitive in their tone and questions though. They hadn't recognized her name, despite her father's status, and the auror seemed to be actively insinuating that the whole scenario was her fault somehow.

The man in question, Investigator John Dawlish, was a textbook example of British pureblood ideology. He had all the grace and tact of a man of 'superior breeding', but none of the noblesse oblige that allowed such a class to live past any kind of significant cultural renaissance. It was a sad fact of British wizarding society that his attitude was considered mild enough to be assigned to be the investigator in a case of abduction and abuse. Harry's patience didn't last long.

"Let's get this straight, Ms. Delacour, you were walking along the French Diagon Alley-"

"Rue de la Sorcellerie," Gabrielle interjected.

"Right, whatever, and you went to a public restroom where you got yourself caught and portkeyed out. Then you managed to get yourself sent over to our shores, eh?"

"I had no choice in it auror, they had me under la potion de mort vivant. I woke in a cell I did not even know I was on your shores.."

"Of course, Ms. Delacour," all of Dawlish's words were right, but his tone didn't quite agree with the message, the corner of Harry's mind dedicated to Gabrielle was lighting up like a Christmas tree. He had enough.

"Excuse me, Dawlish, right?"

"Yes, Mr. Potter?"

"That's Bones, Auror Dawlish, and please bring in my mother. You probably don't realize it, but interviewing Ms. Delacour is above your pay grade. You should immediately alert Minister Fudge."

"I know of no Ancient and Noble House of Delacour," Dawlish began, before Harry Interrupted again.

"That's because no one has done their research in your department, you knew she was French, did you look into French families or politics? The Minister of Magic for France is one Jean-Pierre Delacour, her father. Unless you want to be at the head of an international incident, I suggest you act like less of a git and find someone more important."

Harry and Gabrielle both agreed privately that it was a good thing she wasn't through puberty and so didn't have an allure yet. Her being Veela was hard to miss, their avian natures came out early in their bone structure and their appearances were well remarked upon even in their younger years. It would make the normally unpleasant British 'nobility' even worse to deal with.

Dawlish looked incredibly offended, but with only some minor dithering left to find Amelia, taking the rather useless translator with him. Something told Harry that would come back to bite him, but he just woke up from what the whispers of the healers told him was a weeklong magic coma. He figured his patience had earned its current stressed state.

* * *

><p>In the next half hour a series of international floo calls were made, culminating in Jean-Pierre and Apolline Delacour taking a hastily made international portkey straight to the special hole in St. Mungo's wards for the DMLE's use.<p>

The concerned parents bull-rushed through each layer of security, leaving a half dozen orderlies and aurors stunned (thankfully in an emotional/figurative rather than the more normal magical sense) before finding their daughter's room. Two burly aurors stood out front of the door, each looking less than friendly and even more than less than inclined to move. Jean-Pierre flashed his credentials, which were examined minutely. After it took more than fifteen seconds for the men to assure themselves of his identity, he gave his wife a look. Their youngest was in trouble, this was an primal thing they were doing.

The reason he had fallen in love with and married Appoline hadn't been for her looks (though they hadn't hurt), or even for the mass of brains behind her stunningly beautiful face (neither of which came close to spoiling the affair), no. Jean-Pierre had wooed her for her unique kind of ruthlessness in the pursuit of her family's and her own self-interest. It was something which could not have been sexier to a consummate politician like Jean-Pierre, and it showed itself in situations like this.

Apolline cranked her aura up, well past normal background levels. In a trice the men were an open jaw away from actively drooling, Jean-Pierre plucked his credentials from the numb fingers of the former bars to their passage and the couple made their way into their daughter's room.

As they entered, both took in the scene before them. Gabrielle lay propped up in bed next to one of the most recognizable faces in the magical world, word and discrete photos of Harry having made their ways into the hands of journalists the world over, each looking for a scoop on the boy who had brought an end to the dark lord nearly responsible for another world war. The boy in question was conversing with the head of the British department of magical law enforcement (one of the few magical officials respected outside the UK) and had an arm around their child.

Their entrance had not gone unmarked, and there was a beat of stillness as the two parents saw their daughter for the first time in the two and a half week period during which she had been kidnapped. There was a lot of emotion in their expressions; neither held any uncertainty over the fate that would have befallen their daughter should she have not been found. Veela were sought after, as a rule, by the shadier elements of the wizarding world for their sexual prowess. There was a reason that nearly the entire world's population of the demi-humans lived in warded colonies inside countries with specially protective laws. Seeing their daughter under the arm of a wizard she literally could not have known for longer than two weeks at the outside led them to one mostly correct and completely devastating conclusion.

Under his breath Jean-Pierre whispered, "Nom de dieu de putain de bordel de merde de saloperie de connard d'enculé de ta mère."

Apolline seemed to almost aparate to her daughter's side, and carefully avoiding disrupting the physical connection between Gabrielle and Harry, pressed her head to her daughters.

"_Gabrielle! Daughter! We were so worried we didn't know what to do, they snatched you and the aurors couldn't get traces from the apparition and for the last week the fuc... the British have been making strange inquiries about missing people and we thought one of their basta... senior officials had you and we were so worried!"_

Gabrielle gave Harry's leg a squeeze from where her hand had rested on it, and as he withdrew his arm from around her she threw herself at her mother. She knew exactly how worried they would have been. Apolline cared about little else, and even though Jean-Pierre spent the majority of his time wheeling and dealing in the upper echelons of French society, in the end he too was nothing more than a father putting on airs of being a politician. He confessed to his daughters more than once that the only reason he had gotten into the game to begin with was that he couldn't trust the future of his family's country to anyone else.

"_Mama! By the goddess you have no idea how much I missed you and Papa and Fleur! I just went to use the bathroom, and they came out of nowhere, they used the potion of the living death on me, I woke up in a cell in a warehouse, and they tried to hurt me but I fought them. I was rescued by Harry and a bunch of British aurors, and Harry got really hurt trying to rescue me and we got linked because he bled all over the ritual they were trying to use on me."_

Jean-Pierre had come to his wife and daughter's side by then, Harry and Amelia both looking on the family moment with a mix of embarrassment and amazement, Harry because he was in the meatspace listening to a full conversation in French and he actually understood it, Amelia because she actually recognized the man and woman who had come in as one of the most powerful and influential couples in France and the ICW at large.

"_Gabrielle_," Jean-Pierre said, "_You have no idea how good it is to see you healthy. We love you so much, we were so worried, your sister has not slept a wink since you have been gone. We nearly had to stun her to be able to come here to get you. We were worried about these roast beefs trying to keep us from you, and we were so worried they might have bound you in some way!"_

The sudden guilty expressions shared by the eleven and newly twelve year olds were somehow not a source of comfort to any of the parents in the room.

"_Papa, maman, I... we... well we need to talk. Please-_ let us switch over to English, I do not know if Ms. Bones is fluent in French."

The aforementioned Bones interjected, "I told you Gabrielle, please call me Amelia. I can speak French with some fluency so don't worry too much about me. I do think we should keep it to English though so we don't lose Harry," she said, idly ruffling her son's hair.

Harry threw in the beginning of the bad news (well he and Gabrielle had spent days talking about it as they got to know each other and in reflection didn't think it to be too bad) news, "Funny you should say that. I'm kinda fluent in French now too. It's been a sort of side effect of what happened to Gabrielle and I. Apolline, Jean-Pierre, did you only just find out or have you heard how we got here?"

The vastly more worried parents (Amelia having been somewhat inured to this kind of thing from long exposure) shared a short look, some message passing without words between them. They turned back to Harry and with a gentle shake of the head done in stereo; Harry sighed and took Gabrielle and his mum's hands for comfort.

"Please sit down, it's a bit of a tale."

* * *

><p>The mistaken identity, the attack on Gabrielle's captors, the ritual gone awry, the attack on Harry, an indeterminate time of mental projection. The kids told it all. Harry went through the details and Gabrielle kept him moving on through the bigger picture.<p>

Their place in the observations room of the DMLE wing was thankfully unneeded for any greater task, so they spent most of the rest of the day on their story. Gabrielle filled in details from her time as a captive. The group delicately danced around the idea of what kind of horrors could have happened had the group that had taken her not thought her more valuable 'untainted'.

The hardest part of the story was trying to define or share what they understood of their relationship now. Since they were back out in the meatspace they could fully realize just how they were tied together. They shared their thoughts on the ritual, and Amelia shared that the British unspeakables were still pulling apart at an arithmantic level. The head unspeakable had evidently sought out Amelia to tell her that it was likely they would never tear down what happened to a level that would give them any kind of definite answer. The factors involved were simply too complex to lend themselves to solvable arithmantic expressions. The kids now trusted each other, they shared a connection at a magical level where each could borrow power from the other, they shared a connection at the mental level with each describing a similar feeling of the other in their minds, and they felt a compulsion (in the magical sense) to maintain a physical connection for now as well. Practically the only good news they had for Gabrielle's worried parents was that in their mental experience they should be able to be separated physically without pain or trouble in two weeks or so.

The time frame thankfully allowed each to separate in enough time to attend their respective schools, with the French school Beauxbatons also being a boarding school.

The trouble in their conversation was what to do moving forward. Gabrielle was Veela, Harry a metamorph. Each of their natures removed a significant amount of the 'boys/girls are gross, throw rocks at them!' feelings that most their ages would have felt. Being so removed from that awkwardness meant that they could have a conversation (or series thereof) back in the mindspace about where they were going, and they didn't want to lose one another. Whether or not it was due to the ritual, they had grown really close.

It took a terrifying moment for both of them. Harry relinquished his mum's hand; Gabrielle drew her knees to herself and leaned into Harry who put an arm around her. They didn't want to have to say goodbye to each other forever. Gabrielle wanted to see if she could attend Hogwarts, British educational standards being officially (which is to say as far as they knew) only slightly behind French on the international stage. Harry's recreation of the castle had sung to both of them, and Gabrielle wanted someone in her life who would not grow to resent her when she inevitably went through puberty and discovered the Veela inside her.

It was a striking image to the parents. Harry with a protective arm around her, her leaning into him. She had a vulnerable air around her that Harry instinctively recognized from the moment he saw her in the warehouse, and without thinking about how it would look to either of their parents he had tried to give her what comfort he could.

It would take work for all of them, but between Amelia and the Delacours, they worked out a way to get it together over a few hours. Both kids would need to spend the next year at their separate schools, it was too late to change that, but for the pair's third years, they would both be at Hogwarts.

The biggest concern the Delacours had was whether or not their daughter would be safe, but all it took to address that concern was to reveal his heritage. Hogwarts herself already kept an eye on her students, and Harry felt sure the family in particular. If she attended, Gabrielle would be extended the same slightly preferential status that being associated with a direct heir to the founders conferred. Aside from which, the castle definitely owed him for his work at the semester's end. Their fears were mollified, news of a Troll in Hogwarts having spread internationally, and news of Voldemort having spread to them personally from their new friends.

* * *

><p>Their day at the hospital was well spent. As they left Amelia smoothed the ruffled feathers of the guards to the DMLE wing. Many had reported angrily to her as Apolline's aura wore off, none had found sympathy however. As it turned out, stalling a head of state in their quest to see their kidnapped child was not really something she had patience for.<p>

The Delacours extracted a promise from their daughter, Harry, Amelia, and several nearby orderlies that they would not leave the safety of the hospital, and then took their portkey back to France and Chateau Delacour. A few minutes later they reappeared with a taller, significantly more buxom, and very tearful version of Harry's new friend.

"_GABRIELLE! GoddessaboveIwassoworriedandyouweren'tthereandnooneknew!"_ The older girl had tears streaming from her eyes as she wrapped Gabrielle in a massive hug. Harry knew well how much Fleur loved and relied on her sister. The males (and a number of ladies) flocked to Fleur at school. It was impossible for her to be taken seriously in any context because of the number of literally drooling men around her at any given point. Her 'friends' were after her body, her enemies were too. Anything good she did was because of her allure; anything bad was because she was a 'bimbo'. Gabrielle kept her grounded, and Fleur was hit very hard by her kidnapping.

Fleur was a sobbing mess draped around her sister, who was focused entirely on comforting her sister. Harry could feel the warmth of Gabrielle's love for her sister emanating from the piece of mental real estate her shared with the small Veela. It took a while, but Fleur got control of herself, and for the rest of the day the three were inseparable.

The group as a whole headed to the Ossuary. In rapid French Gabrielle explained to Fleur how she had to stay in contact with Harry. If they lost connection for more than a minute they felt compelled to get back and if they held out for too much longer the place in each of their mind spaces that connected them began to pulse with mild pain. Thus far they hadn't gone more than five minutes, and neither had any desire to test it.

* * *

><p>Harry left the floo portal in the main receiving hall of the Ossuary with his customary grace. Which is a classy way of saying that he exited the jade fire of the floo at around five miles an hour faster than he had entered and arse first. The inside of the public areas of the Ossuary were all done in a highly polished cream colored stone. The Bones who had commissioned the manor had really been into the bone theme. Harry slid four full meters on the highly polished floor, coming to rest sitting at Susan's feet.<p>

"Hahahahahaha, oh bollocks, I hate the floo. Hey Suse!" Harry said dumbly from his ignoble position.

Susan leaned forward and wrapped her brother in a tight hug, "We have been so worried you big dumb oaf. How do you get into this stuff! We were gonna have a party and it was your stupid birthday."

She was an inch from tears, a hurried glance to his sides showed all his girls in the same state. Harry got to his feet and the hug with his sister turned into a group hug as Hannah and Nym joined in. Andi stood behind them, Harry had woken up on her day off, and she had been watching the kids.

The family (sans the god-brother, who hadn't yet heard that Harry was back up) assured themselves that Harry was in fact whole, and behind them the Delacours and Amelia flooed in. Harry left his tearful hugs with his family to stand at Gabrielle's side, taking her hand to relieve the tension in the back of his mind. The entire family looked askance on the two pre-teens and the still incredibly upset Veela that followed them. In short order Harry and Gabrielle told their tale for the second time that day.

* * *

><p>As of the day Harry woke, twenty-four days remained in the summer. They each passed too quickly as the family and their new addition made good use of each of them. Harry, Hannah, Susan, and Nym showed Gabrielle and Neville around the Ossuary and Abbot grounds. They all had a fine time, but on reflection Nym seemed… snippy.<p>

It was in many ways a girl thing, in as far as Harry and Neville were clueless of it at least. Susan and Hannah chose not to involve themselves, but Gabrielle and Nym were definitely in a state of cold war. The family would fly around the grounds and Nym's movements would become increasingly reckless in an attempt to impress Harry, something which was hard to do on a training broom. Gabrielle was careful to do small things like make eye contact with Nym during her magically enforced cuddle time with the oblivious boy.

Nym thought she had staked out a claim on Harry. They had adventured enough around Hogwarts and the family's grounds, she was the one who was always with him. Gabrielle had just spent a somewhat arbitrary amount of time inside Harry's head alone with the boy. Susan and Hannah could only sit back and reflect on how it would end badly if they couldn't make peace.

The collected family threw another party, no surprise and Harry never anyone's line of sight this time, for Harry, Neville and Hannah. Harry and Neville had nearly identical birthdays and Hannah's was July 16th. Harry had the chance to thank everyone who had lent time to the effort to figure out what had happened to him, particularly to Ragnok and Griffy, both of whom he deeply appreciated. He wasn't even of the same species as them, and despite his friendship with the pair it made their help more meaningful to him for them to have assisted. It wasn't exactly a nice world out there.

At their party on the 16th Hagrid came and hand delivered the family's letters. It was normally a birthday thing, but Harry having missed his, Nym's being during the year, and Hannah's being that day, it had seemed an opportune time. The kids and the adults all agreed to have their trip to Diagon on the 23rd, as it would be the Delacour's last day in jolly old England.

The trip was unremarkable, aside from the stacks of Lockhart books each of them had to buy. Word around the alley spoke of an embarrassing encounter near Harry and Neville's birthday where Lucius Malfoy and Arthur Weasley fought 'like common muggles'. The shopkeepers along the alley gossiped like proverbial old women, to the everyone's continued amusement. Gabrielle was entering her first year, the family was mostly entering their second.

The Delacours caught an international portkey out of the alley at the end of the family's shopping day. For the first time, but nowhere near the last, Gabrielle needed her sister's support instead of the other way around. She was in silent tears by the time her family departed for the continent, Fleur's hug the only thing keeping her together.

As a long silver chain whisked his newest friend into a pocket dimension and away, Harry folded his arms around himself. He didn't speak again that day outside of answers to direct questions, and when the family finished up with refreshing their potions reagents, he went directly to his room alone. He needed to think it out, he decided. Harry skipped dinner that night.

No one said anything about his absence the next day. They just stayed a little closer than normal. He appreciated it.

It was another quiet week before the first, and the family's return to Hogwarts.


	17. Chapter 16: Second Year Cometh!

Chapter 16: Second Year Cometh!

The Hogwarts express was an interesting piece of wizarding Britain. It represented one of the English Ministry's only forays into sanctioned magical-muggle technological interface, the only other of note being the Wizarding Wireless Network.

The Express and platform Nine and Three-Quarters was conceived of decades before by Hogwarts Board of Trustees. In a better time they had sought to include something to make the firstborn more comfortable and to bring the wizards from ancient wizarding linages into the more modern age. It was brilliantly conceived, the enchanting work done by some of the foremost minds of the age. The mundane avoidance and confusion wards were among the most advanced constructed even to the modern day. The train and the line was constructed based on plans 'borrowed' from the Stockton and Darlington Railway company in the early 1800s.

The engine was enchanted for constant steam pressure, for indestructibility, and for speed. The rails were encrusted with runes keeping them from rusting or breaking and ensuring nearly no speed loss to friction. The luggage and passenger cars, however, were the most impressive piece of magic on the train. The Express was built during the early stages of a population boom in British wizarding society, so in a rare look forward for the community, the train was enchanted to spawn new cars and new compartments to match the needs of the people riding it. It was all made possible through the incredible inclusion of near-sentient space expansion charms.

Needless to say, the creators of the whole system were _very_ impressed with themselves, and so it was set that there was no magical way directly into the station. All portkeys, floo travelers, apparations, broom, carpets, and enchanted sets of flying capes and pants were all redirected to a safe area just outside the entrance to the platform.

The Family all met up at the Ossuary (that being the location of greatest small people population) to head over to King's Cross. Neville had spent the night, along with Hannah, which rounded out the group. Nym and her mum being more or less permanent fixtures at this stage. From there it was a short set of side along aparations, and the whole crew was together at the Kings Cross Aparation Station, a bored auror directing them to move along so others could come in behind them.

Despite the best efforts of the Bones elves, the family was running behind that day so it was 10:45 am that everyone was gathered together out in front of the platform change. Harry moved first towards the false wall, taking his time with an easy stroll. The key to not being noticed was acting like whatever you were doing was how the thing should be done. As Amelia frequently told the kids, confidence was key.

It was with great surprise then that Harry, shrunken trunk in pocket and phoenix companion out hunting, walked forehead first into a solid wall.

In an amazing moment for the adults taking up the rear, Harry cried "Bugger!" before backing up a step straight into Nym. Nym made chest to back contact with a reeling Harry, and was knocked directly backward into Neville. Neville, who had been talking intently to Hannah and was therefore looking to his side instead of forward, was hit directly in the chest by the upper body of a flailing metamorph who managed to take out not only him, but the lady his attention was on. In the space of a moment three kids were on the ground groaning, Harry was leaning against a wall clutching his head, and Susan, Amelia, Andi, and the Dowager Longbottom were all doing their own best to not fall over of laughter.

The kids picked themselves up, glaring as one at the boy clutching his head, and the family moved to the side as Amelia and Andi moved forward to figure out why the gateway was closed.

Amelia put her hand to the barrier, and it passed through. Out of curiosity, Nym tried the same experiment, and replicated Amelia's results. One by one, the kids went through the barrier without any trouble, except Harry. Whenever he went to go through, the barrier solidified immediately.

Knowing how late they were, Andi and the esteemed Dowager took the family through to the train, and Amelia took Harry around the pillar the barrier to Nine and Three-Quarters passed through to wait andnot old up traffic.

"Harry, the train's probably going to leave before we can figure out why it's hardening just for you. Give me five minutes to run through and get them to wait a moment for you so we can work it out. I'll be right back, but wait for me here, got it kiddo?"

Giving his assent, Amelia joined the other parents, and Harry began a solid loiter next to the gate. He put his hand in his pockets and began glaring as passers-by, the whole deal, it was one of the contexts in which he was a traditionalists, he only wished he had a cigarette. About two minutes after she disappeared, Harry heard a large family passing through the barrier and two disheveled house elves popped right in front of him. Their sudden appearance causing him to jump and make brief contact with the barrier pillar again.

"Harry! I's being Benny. Griffy has set me to watch over you since yous been bounded to the Gabby. I just caught this one," the small elf shook the other, marginally more disheveled, elf he was holding by the arm, "makings the barrier be solids for you."

The other elf immediately spoke up, "I's said I was sorry! I didn't hear that Harry is being one of us, I would have just talked to him if I knows that! Harry, my name is being Dobby. I's with Malfoy family. I just wanted you to know, Malfoy family is being planning something bad to happen at Hogwarts this year! I's can't say what, family things, but I wanteds to warn you and stop yous from going back. I didn't know yous were one of us, else I wouldn't have interfered with you. I's sorry!"

Harry leaned his back against the pillar and sunk to his knees so he was level with the two elves, "Thank you for looking out for me Benny, I owe you and I owe Griffy. You all just let me know what I can do, yeah?" Benny nodded his thanks, a smile wide on his small face, "And Dobby, don't worry too much, I don't hold it against you. I understand that I look human and act human, I can't fault you for not knowing I'm also a brother elf. Thanks for letting me know there's going to be danger. You let me know what I can do to help you too, okay?"

Benny let go of Dobby, and the two elves nodded their assent. Harry shook dobby's tiny hand, and gave Benny a quick hug (He was pretty attached to the Hogwarts elves), "Can I go through now? I promise you Dobby that I will be careful, and now you know that Griffy and the Hogwarts guys have my back."

Dobby snapped his fingers with a smile, and then popped away, Benny soon doing the same. Harry sat back for a moment with a smile. It was something he loved about elves, and something he felt made him just a bit more like them. They were very agreeable folks. They all just wanted to do the best they could, and in the face of new information, they absorbed, adapted, and moved on. Harry loved them, and he couldn't be more proud to be accepted by them.

Standing, he swiftly moved through the barrier and found his mum in a quiet but demonstrative conversation with the engineer of the train. He pulled at her sleeve to get her attention.

"It's okay mum, I worked it out, I made it through."

The engineer looked at him for a moment, and muttering under his breath moved off back to the gleaming engine. Amelia turned fully to him, "How did you get through, I ran a diagnostic or two from this side and I couldn't identify anything keeping it solid for you. It had to have been something keyed to your signature, but there wasn't anything on the gate beside its normal avoidance and confusion wards."

Harry looked a little abashed for a moment, "Its elf business mum. I can't say. But it shouldn't ever be a problem again."

Amelia looked up and opened her mouth to say something, but after a moment shut it with a confused look on her face. She looked back at her son and opened it again to say something else, and thought better of it. It was just Harry-madness she decided. That way lay a deep and wide rabbit hole. If she recalled correctly it ended out okay overall for Alice, but honestly she wasn't sure she had the same constitution for strange that girl did. Amelia decided to just leave it.

"Just hurry along and get on the train. Susan, Nym and the rest should all be in the first couple cars," She leaned down and hugged her son, squeezing him tightly, "I love you kiddo. Please keep safe. Please, please, please. Try to not kill your defense professor again, stay away from trolls, and for the love of god kid, if a bunch of aurors pull you aside to join an operation, talk to me first, yeah?"

Harry returned the hug with fervor, "I'll do my best mum. You know I will."

Amelia stood and looked at her boy, "I was really afraid you'd say that. Now scoot!"

Harry snapped off a salute, she returned it, and he made his way onto the train to track down Nym and the rest. A few moments later a classically dressed conductor stepped from the engine. He removed a pocket watch from his coat, wound it, and looked to the station clock before shouting, "All aboard!" A few blasts of the steam whistle later, the Hogwarts express started its yearly journey for the Scottish Highlands.

* * *

><p>As the train began moving, Harry started making his way through the first few cars. The compartments of the first were reserved for the prefects and head boy and girls as usual. The second car was where he expected to find his friends, but after checking all the compartments he couldn't find them. The third car was a bust as well, but halfway down the fourth he found them filling a compartment.<p>

Nym noticed him first, "Hey! We were hoping you'd keep going down! All the places were full, we were lucky to find room here," Harry swept his gaze through their compartment, noting the one person he didn't already know as Nym continued, "Neville noticed that this place didn't seem full, and our new friend Luna here offered to let us all join her."

The aforementioned Luna looked up at hearing her name and saw the new arrival, "Aha! Harry Bones! Bloody finally! I came here because I heard from the dabberblimps that you'd be here," her expression had started out bright and eager, but as she continued her face took on an incredibly confuse cast, "They were also telling me that you did a lot of work with mud and ceramics. I don't see how though, unless..."

As Luna trailed off she stood, her bright yellow sundress and her dirty blonde hair swaying in the gentle breeze from the open window, and took Harry's right hand checking carefully under his nails and sniffing at each of his fingers. After a moment of confusion on Harry's part and suppressed amusement on everyone else's, she sat back down looking as confused as Harry did, "No, I don't see or smell any kind of clay. I don't see how you could possibly be a potter. Hmph. Damn 'blimps, bunch of plonkers, always lying to me."

In a manner Harry could only call adorable and at complete odds to the fact that she spoke like a dock worker, she crossed arms and scrunched into herself as she harrumphed. He giggled.

"You'd be surprised, Luna. I would like to think that I'm a very decent potter, in fact I was even born a Potter. Thank fully I was later rescued by my bones. Also I would like to think that I clean up well."

The family caught his joke, and Luna brightened to the bubbly girl he had seen when he entered, "Good," she said, "I like those bastard 'blimps, they glow at night when they keep me company. And they taught me all the best curse words!"

Harry took a seat, "Yeah, I was going to ask, why are you swearing so much? Not that I mind, I love cursing, mind you."

Nym cleared her throat, looking at Harry intently, and he immediately amended, "I'm sorry, I _fucking_ love _bloody_ cursing."

He turned to her and got the nod he was looking for.

Luna looked at the byplay curiously, "Well I wanted to be a sailor when I was smaller, and my Daddy told me that if I wanted to be something I should bloody well try my best. I read some books about them and met a few and I thought that if that bunch of twats cursed, I should too!"

Susan and Hannah were in stitches, Neville was red in the face from suppressed laughter, and Nym's hair was rapidly changing colors as she faced her own laughter related issues. Harry wore a wide grin as he spoke to their new friend, "That is a really admirable goal, but maybe you should try and tone it down a little. I think our friend Hermione is going to throw a fit when she meets you, and if you keep cursing you might be in a little trouble in your classes."

Luna accepted that logic, though she did complain about the professors at Hogwarts being 'a bunch of bloody toffs'.

"Luna, you wouldn't happen to be Luna Lovegood, would you? Daughter of the Xenophilius Lovegood that runs The Quibbler? Cousin to Lysergis Lovegood of the Burning Man shaman?" Harry asked with a curious glint in his eye.

Luna giggled for a moment and looked off into the distance, "Cousin Lysergis! I haven't seen that cheeky bastard since my eye-opening. He is a good man, wise too. He trained with some of the last Nahuatl shaman," She refocused and looked at Harry, "Yes, I am that Luna," suddenly she looked confused, "But really I'm this Luna. Can that Luna be the same as this Luna? How would that work," she paused for a beat, the family looking entirely confused and amused around her, "Nope, wait, that Luna is definitely this Luna, so really we're all the same," she finished with a satisfied smile, having resolved her momentary identity crisis.

Harry, in a surprising feat of mental gymnastics, followed the whole line of thought, "I agree. And your cousin is actually a hero of mine. I've read a bit of the Burning Man shaman's works. But anyway, do you think you can put me into contact with a bodyguard your father employed? A guy by the name Remus Lupin?"

Harry honestly didn't think it was possible, but Luna's mood appeared to brighten further, "Oooh, sure! I liked that bugger! Even if he seems like he was exposed to Luple weed when he was young," the family's faces must have shown their curiosity or confusion as she continued, "luple weed mimics the effects of lycanthropy, but I'm pretty sure he wasn't a werewolf because I kept leaving rabbits all around him and he never ate even one."

As a group they decided to leave that one alone.

Luna turned out to be a lot of fun. They had been bandying the phrase new friend about casually in reference to her, but as the train ride went on they began to actually mean it. She had interesting theories on a number of magical creatures that none of the family had ever heard of, and she was generally bubbly and cute, despite her… unusual word choices.

Before long Hermione also showed up in the compartment. Her parents were still uncomfortable with magic and the magical world, so they had not allowed her to spend much time with the family over the summer. Hermione swore they were getting a bit better though and she expected to be able to visit and perhaps spend some time with the friends the next summer.

Hermione unfortunately was also immediately at odds with Luna. None of the creatures Luna talked about speaking to or seeing were in any of the books that Hermione had read, so she took issue with her claims. The prolific swearing didn't help much.

The biggest event of the trip was another appearance by Draco Malfoy.

Shortly after the trolley lady came by and plied her wares, the silver haired boy showed up flanked by his constant companions, Crabbe and Goyle. This year the friends didn't lock their compartment, so he simply threw open the doors and waltzed in.

"They say Harry Potter is in this compartment, and... Ah yes," he said, spotting Harry, "Well Potter, you've been quiet at school before now, but I've decided that this year I'm going to do you a favor. You will have the privilege of being my good friend, you'll no longer have to hang around this riff-raff, and you'll get to know the people around Hogwarts who are truly only of the best breeding." He finished with an imperious smile, and turned on his heel, walking out into the hall again.

The friend all looked at one another, trying to figure out if what just happened had, in fact, actually just happened. After a few moments and when Harry didn't move from his seat next to Nym and Luna, Draco stepped back into the compartment.

"Well? Come along, Potter, we don't have all day!"

Harry looked to the boy, "Oh I'm sorry, did you mean me? The name is Bones, friend, and honestly I'm doing just fine here. Thanks for the offer though I suppose. If you'd close the door on your way back out that would be nice."

Draco's face clouded with rage, "Now see here, Potter. You have a chance to become a friend and ally of one of House Malfoy!"

Harry leaned back into his seat, and placed his arms around the two girls next to him, giving both a half-hug, "Honestly mate, I'm doing perfectly well where I am. You go have fun though."

"Well Potter, seems like you may just go the same way as your parents. My father wi-"

Harry quick as a flash stood and morphed his face into a likeness of Draco's before countering, "Not before my father hears of this! Didn't I tell you last year, disgrace to our house, wearing ugly robes like that and associating with people of half troll stock!"

He started advancing towards the doors to the compartment, driving Draco out step by step, "Why if my father were here right now he would whip you for talking down to your betters and behaving in such an undignified manner, you bring shame to the house and-"

Harry slammed the doors together in the Slytherin's face and cast a fast locking charm on the door, followed by a silencing charm. He turned and replaced his wand in its holster with a flourish, "That, ladies and gentlemen, is how you drive off a snake without resorting to St. Patrick's staff, or a bit of the old ultra-violence."

Hermione scoffed for a moment with a teasing smile on her face, "Ultra-violence, I knew giving you those old sci-fi books was going to end up a bad idea."

Harry countered as he sat, "Ha! You're just afraid that this little face-dancer will end up being the kwisatz-haderach!"

As the rest of the family looked on again in apparent confusion, Luna cast her face in a sagely manner and intoned, "Muad'dib brings honor to us all."

* * *

><p>Unbeknownst to the family and its friends, Harry had accidentally warded off a second visitor earlier that day. Draco Malfoy had been given a directive from his father to make a connection with the boy-who-lived, and Ron Weasley had been discretely given the same mission by his mother. Ron met with difficulties entering the station however.<p>

In the minutes after the family discovered that Harry could not enter the station, and before he had been taken aside by a pair of house elves, the clan Weasley entered the station along with the Twin's friend Lee Jordan and Ron's friends Dean Thomas and Seamus Finnegan. The Weasley matriarch and patriarch had both entered the station first with their youngest to ensure she made it on the train without any trouble. The brothers then entered, with Ron and his friends being pushed to the end of the line by Fred and George.

Just as they were about to pass the barrier into the station, Harry rested his back against the pillar that held the barrier as he spoke quietly to an elf named Dobby. While he and Dobby spoke, Ron, Dean and Seamus all crashed into the barrier and scattered their things in front of it. As Harry continued speaking they all jumped up and pounded on the still solid barrier, each desperate to get in as they were already running late.

While Harry finished his conversation, they quickly re-packed their things. As he headed through the barrier to find his mum, they were racing out of the station to a certain enchanted car. As Harry found his friends, they were being spotted by mundanes across Britain in a flying Ford Anglia.

Theirs would be an interesting entrance to the school year.

* * *

><p>As the Hogwarts express pulled into the Hogsmeade station, the friends all changed into their robes and made themselves ready for their year to begin. As the train finally came to a stop outside the small country-style station they all filed out of the compartment, and further out of the train.<p>

Hagrid, the lovable half-giant protectorate of House Gryffindor, held his massive oak wand aloft, a _lumos_ providing the light that for years he had used a large lantern for.

"Firs' years this way! Firs' years over here!" He called into the crowds of students.

Luna began to point her steps away from the friends she had made and towards the rest of the new students when Harry took her aside for a moment, "Luna, tradition forbids me from saying how you get sorted, but I just wanted to make sure you know one thing before it happens. It doesn't matter where you end up, you have a place with me and the rest, okay?"

Harry had gotten some vibes from her during the trip. The way she went suddenly quiet sometimes. The occasional thousand yard stare. She put up a good facade, but he had a feeling her past had been dark in a similar way to how his had been.

Her countenance lost a bit of luster, but gained a tint Harry associated with more real emotion, "Thanks Harry. You guys are nice. I hope I can be in Hufflepuff with you."

They exchanged a smile and both went on their ways.

* * *

><p>Harry, Susan, Hannah, Nym, Neville and Hermione all together entirely filled one of the carriages headed to the castle. They came in and with only a brief altercation with their favorite poltergeist managed their way to the Hufflepuff table.<p>

As Harry sat the whispering around the hall increased, and he could practically feel the number of eyes on him move from the ten his friends supplied to scores from people around the room. He ducked his head and grumbled a bit.

Nym quickly picked up on the source of her friend's distress, and slung an arm around him, giving a gentle squeeze, "We knew you were gonna get stared at, the whole Potter thing was just as bad at the end of last year. Just be normal and it'll be okay. You and me will just glamor our robes and pretend to be Ravenclaws in the halls again. It'll be alright."

Harry briefly pressed his head to her shoulder, causing a smile he couldn't see to light up her face his muffled voice sounded out, "Thanks Nym. I already lost Gabrielle for a year and now I get to be stared at. I don't know what I'd do without you."

Her smile softened, "You'd go down in flames, you big dummy. Don't forget it."

Before too long the line of small and scared first years filed into the great hall. They moved between the ravens and the badgers with timid steps, trying to prepare themselves for the sorting. As she passed, the friends shot smiles and quiet encouragement to Luna.

McGonagall made her way to the front of the room, stool and hat in hand, and after Valentino the Hat's short song, the sorting began. The badgers got their normal share of the group, with only two sortings of note. First, the esteemed Lovegood (a name which reduced the Weasley twins to stitches) sat beneath the hat for a solid minute and a half before it declared her for the Yellow and Black. Harry made room for her on his side not occupied by a slightly jealous metamorph. The second sorting was of the youngest of the Weasley clan, one Ginerva.

Hers was an interesting sort, as she lasted almost as long under Valentino the Hat's brim as Harry had. Five full minutes of facial expressions that showed a venomous argument followed, before she was sorted in the den of the lions. As she stood and made her way to sit near her cheering brothers, Harry caught a longing look at the Hufflepuff table and himself in particular. Something deep inside him told him that he had dodged a bullet.

The feast soon ended, and the friends found their beds. They were all soon asleep; after all, they had a brand new year to start the next morning.


	18. Chapter 17: A Ponce, A Bat, And a Dragon

Chapter 17: A Dragon, A bat, And A Ponce

The next morning dawned cold and early, before too long the Hufflepuff dormitories bore witness to the sights and sound of a generation of teenagers waking and meeting the day. Harry and Neville quickly finished their morning ablutions and went down to the richly appointed common room. Much could be said of the house of badgers, but no one could bring into question their taste.

The contingent of the fairer sex soon met the boys, and as a group the friends went out to the great hall for their first breakfast. As they entered the hall, they all got their second look at this year's staff table, and again they each couldn't quite believe who occupied it. The last night they had been more tired than anything. Most years the feast was just a stopgap measure before the famous Hogwarts beds saw use. Now that they had time to process what was up, the celebrity in their midst stuck out like a sore thumb (not just because he seemed to be wearing the most eye watering set of cyan robes any of the friends had ever seen).

Sitting at the head table, evidently still wiping the sleep from his eyes, was Gilderoy Lockhart. In the magical world he was something of a folk hero, like Daniel Boone in the colonies, Simo Häyhä to the Fins, or Guy Fawkes more locally. He was a little bit larger than life, a fact not harmed in the least by the number of books written about him. Apparently that was why all of his books were on the required list for this year, he was the new DADA guy. In many ways it was a bit disconcerting to the friends to see him sitting at the staff table and examining his teeth with a hand mirror.

As they all sat down and began their breakfast the first post of the year arrived, and in an interesting twist a steaming howler was seen to arrive in the grasp of an owl that looked like it had seen better decades.

The poor example of the avian species landed in a crash at the table of the brave, directly in front of a certain young Weasley. Hedwig, who loved attending a Hogwarts breakfast, if only for the bacon, quickly moved her head under her wing as a voice that seemed larger than life began screeching.

**"RONALD BILLIUS WEASLEY! WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU WERE DOING! THERE WERE A HUNDRED WAY YOU COULD HAVE GOTTEN TO SCHOOL INSTEAD OF STEALING YOUR FATHER'S CAR! A THOUSAND EVEN! HE IS FACING AN INQUIRY AT WORK, AND YOU ARE THE CAUSE! DO YOU KNOW HOW MANY OF THOSE DAMNED MUGGLES SAW YOU, FLYING ABOUT IN A CAR? THE TREE YOU HIT IS WORTH ORE AND IS MORE RARE THAN YOU ARE! DO YOU KNOW HOW MUCH TROUBLE WE ARE ALL IN AND-"**

It was hard, but the friends did their best to tune the voice coming from the red envelope out. They couldn't help but feel embarrassed for Weasley. Overall he was a massive prick, but who couldn't feel embarrassed for the kid?

As if on cue, the letter ended and they found out who. Uproarious, sidesplitting laughter began emanating from the Slytherin table, starting next to the most entertaining snake and spreading along the table. After a quick explanation to Hermione about what exactly a howler is, the friends all met eyes. It looked like the idiocy of the Ron/Draco feud wasn't going to be joining Quirrell in the things about first year no one would miss.

For all of the friends save Luna, the first lesson of the year would end up being Herbology. Luna had the good fortune of seeing Professor McGonagall for her first lesson. The friends made sure to assure her and their other firsties that McGonagall was stern but fair. Harry was sure to whisper his suspicion that she was a lot less stern than she appeared, but she was a huge stickler for the rules, so Luna should really consider cutting down on calling folks 'bloody plonkers'. The students all left for their books before heading to class.

The friends all headed outside for the first foray into the greenhouses for the year. As they left the castle and began their journey they spotted the unflappable professor Sprout laden down with what looked like hospital wing standard bandages and a bag of clinking vials. Her expression was strained, Harry noted, and she was closely followed by Professor Lockhart, who was loudly describing ways he had seen of healing similar trees that he had encountered in his travels. Privately Harry was impressed, if what he was describing worked, he had seen some truly impressive stuff. He couldn't help but anxiously anticipate the upcoming class.

For a moment the adult cloaked in what even the girls had to say was a tastelessly bright robe locked eyes with the young nobleman. Harry picked up a weighing and calculating impression from the man. An involuntary shiver passed through the boy. He couldn't help but think that maybe that's how a number of dark creatures had felt before their demise.

The friend's first lesson was a crash course in _mandragora_, one of magical agriculture's more useful specimens. The mandrake restorative draught was widely used as a sort of panacea for any kind of physically altering trauma. Harry and Nym spent a few minutes speculating on the effect it would have on their physiology, but passed it off as a bad job. Sprout had explained that the magical properties of the disturbingly humanoid root were rooted, if the pun was pardonable, in a return to one's natural state. Specifically to humanoids. Their natural states were change, so honestly it was a craps shoot that neither desired to experiment too much with. Despite their work in advancing their natural talents, bot had a healthy fear, especially after the most recent ritual mishap that Harry had gone through, of combining external magical influences with their own transitory natures.. It was a recipe for an unknown magical reaction, which experience taught them was a bad idea.

Following their lesson was a brief round of showers to ward off the pervasive influence of dragon dung fertilizer, lunch, and a second straight class with the house of the lions. Defense against the dark arts.

While Dumbledore and Nicholas Flamel held the titles of widest known and most powerful wizards in the European theatre, Lockhart occupied the enviable position of most popular. The former wizards were all from the last generation (or more honestly, harry figured, like three generations back), Lockhart was the wizard of the 1990s. Brand new and kicking. His exploits, chronicled in his own hand and widely read, were the stuff of urban legend. His looks not hurting any of these facts in the least.

The kids were all eagerly anticipating their first exposure to what could only have been one of the most experienced wizards of the age. They entered the classroom to find that it had been changed entirely from the last year. Quirrell's room had been dark, with garlands of garlic hanging from the ceiling beams and crosses made of silver and wood peppered across the room. Voldy and his servant had really been playing the vampire angle. The windows in the room had been covered by thick black cloth and the light had been supplied by innumerable candles in the shape of human spinal columns and Hogwarts standard torches.

Lockhart had the windows exposed and cleaned, filling the room with natural light. The walls were covered in enchanted posters of him, each grinning like a loon and exposing the smile that had won the Witch Weekly best smile competition a bunch of times. Lockhart had hung the skeleton of what looked like a small dragon, Harry's guess was Peruvian Vipertooth, from the ceiling. The whole place just threw off a Lockhart vibe, which was okay in the friend's books.

The students all sat down and many placed their books on the desk, the pile of seven blocking their gaze of the front of the classroom entirely. There was an air of anticipation in the air as this would be the first defense class Lockhart had this year, and they were eagerly awaiting his words.

When everyone was finally situated, there was a beat of silent tension, before the door to the defense office (up a short set of stairs at the front end of the room) was thrown open and the man himself made his dramatic entrance.

He began speaking as he walked down the steps to the class's level, "Hello my young pupils! Welcome to both of our first defense periods of the year! I've been looking forward to this moment all summer, and now finally it's here. You all will have the most excellent opportunity to pick my brain and get experience that will help each of you one day perhaps be as accomplished as I am," He reached the bottom of the steps and preened for a moment, boffing his fingernails briefly against his shirt and examining them in the light of the window he was silhouetted against. Unbidden, Hedwig sent him an image of her doing the exact same thing with her claws and he had to suppress a laugh.

"I am Gilderoy Norman Jasper Lockhart esquire, Order of Merlin third class recipient, honorary member of the Dark Force Defense League, five time winner of Witch Weekly's most charming smile award," _Five, THAT was the number_, Harry thought, "and Inventor of the world's finest shampoo, based on my own research of the follicle based properties of occamy eggs. I've saved no less than five villages of people from nightmarish horrors of the worst sort, and I've fought yeti, werewolves, and banshees to the death in hand to hand combat."

He paused there, as if for applause, but the class was a mixture of overwhelmed by his charm and hanging on his every word. He continued, "My plan for the first day is to see how much you all know already of my various and sundry accomplishments, so there will be a short quiz before we begin in earnest!"

He gave his wand a stab and wave move towards a pile of what were evidently to be their tests, thoroughly flubbing the spell and causing the pile to burst into flames. There were shrieks from across the classroom, some from people scared of the fire (Their unfortunate Weasley classmate), some from people who were terrified to see Lockhart do something wrong (The Brown and Patil girls from the Gryffs who loved their makeup and gossip) and one from a girl who hated to see someone deface a quiz.

Lockhart looked horrified around the room and quickly announced, "NOT TO WORRY not to worry! I have this under control!"

The nightmare in blue-green sent a _ventus_ at the pile of burning paper, thinking he would blow the fire out, but really only sending flaming paper into the faces of the people in the first row and distributing hot ash around the room. Thankfully the front row consisted of the friends. Harry, Nym, and Susan all threw up shields, blocking the students off of the fire and unfortunately causing the wind to redirect the papers both up and back at the caster of the spell.

Lockhart burst into girly screams as a small piece of one of his rapidly oxidizing quizzes landed in his hair and set whatever product he used aflame. Harry could only start chuckling as the walking matchstick began running back and forth, smacking himself in the head in a vain attempt to save his hair so he could one day again be vain.

The man did a full circle of the room before Harry realized he should do something before Lockhart's brain fried. He nudged Nym, and performed an _aguamenti. _The blast of water put out the flaming professor drenching him entirely in the process. The man spluttered under the aquatic assault, and when Harry and his female counterpart let their spells die, before them stood the stunning opposite of the man who had walked down the steps into the room not five minutes before.

Lockhart's robes, when wet, turned an ugly dark vomit-like color. His hair was singed, black in some place and falling out in others, and hung flat to his face obscuring half of it. The man's hands and forehead both looked like they need burn treatments, with small blisters forming on them as they student's watched. The man looked like a kicked puppy that had been accidently set on fire; a comparison which Harry felt may not have been too far off the mark at the moment.

The professor, having taken a moment to calm down after being hosed down, took one look at a mirror on the wall and without saying a word sprinted straight for the door. Neglecting to watch his steps, he tripped on a desk that had been knocked over by a student worried about the flaming paper, and crashed to the ground, impacting the floor face first and hard, knocking himself square out.

The classroom was dead silent and unmoving for a full minute. Ron Weasley was being held in the arms of Dean Thomas, who had caught him as he jumped to get away from the fire. Lavender Brown, Pavarti Patil, and the rest of the Gryffindor girls all wore disturbingly identical expressions of dismay and fear. Harry couldn't take his eyes from the lump of professor on the floor.

"Umm. I'm gonna call that as a class dismissed. Do any of you Gryffindor types want to come with me and take him to the hospital wing? I'd like a non-Hufflepuff to be there to confirm the story of… this," Harry said into the silent room.

He got a shaky nod from the gossipy lions, and began packing his things.

It was an interesting first lesson.

* * *

><p>The next day the second year 'Puffs had their first Potions lesson, and it too was an interesting one for the group.<p>

Severus Snape had not, it seemed, missed the fact that Harry had revealed a portion of his heritage at the end of the last year. In the two weeks before the semester ended after Harry let that fact go, he had only seen Snape three times, so it hadn't been a big deal. It seemed that the dour potions master wasn't going to continue that pattern.

Where before in potions he had only been a minor nuisance, essentially leaving the badgers and ravens to their own devices, now he came after Harry specifically with a vengeance. The entire first lesson, after leaving the instructions on the board that is, he simply stood behind Harry and commented on his brewing technique.

They were working on a simple draught, actually a review from the last year, which cured one's acne. The only thing of note with the process was that if an incorrect amount of powdered hippogryph claw were added in addition to leaving it over heat for too long, it formed something very much like mundane thermite. Not necessarily explosive, but it burns so hot that it could melt through the magically strengthen cauldron and work table straight through the floor. At one point Harry questioned how a potion intended to get rid of one's spots could do that, but he had been forced again to conclude that magic was weird and let it go.

As Harry approached that step in the process, he noticed his caldron seem to flicker for an instant. Writing it off as a consequence of the volume of fumes in the air with no outlet, he just kept going. After making double-sure of the amount he was adding (he knew about the bad reaction because of rumors about what happened in the Gryffindor section to Weasley), he put it in and set the next step in motion, only for the liquid in his cauldron to go bright vivid orange, and start emitting heat well above what the burner he had it on should have been capable of.

Snape immediately vanished his work, "It's amusing, Potter," He said mockingly, "It so like your father to make a foolish mistake and endanger your fellow students, twenty points from Hufflepuff for being a dangerous imbecile."

Harry wasn't pleased.

After class, he compared his notes with all of the friends. Neville always had trouble, but he knew so much about the plants involved that he was the go to man for an explanation about why any given reaction had happened. Hermione knew the instructions front to back, and Hannah had an almost preternatural talent for understanding what happened in any given potion at any given time.

Neville confirmed his understanding of what could have, and evidently did go wrong. Hannah had been next to him during the lesson though, and confirmed that he had done every step right. They couldn't figure it out.

* * *

><p>The friend's next DADA lesson was <em>significantly <em>more subdued than the last. It was a rough toss-up in Harry's mind as to whether or not the first class was run into the ground by incompetence or bad luck. He knew his own particular brand of fortune, so Harry decided to give the man the benefit of the doubt. Nym and Neville, one being immune to appearances and the other being unattracted to the man, were both in the same place.

Susan, Hannah, and Hermione were all looking forward to having a real lesson with the man. To everyone's amusement, Hermione actually had drawn small hearts around Lockhart's block in her schedule. Harry was pretty certain he was the only one to notice that Hannah quickly hid her schedule when the friends saw Hermione's.

The class itself began with Lockhart firmly planted in a seat at the head of the room. There was no quiz this time, instead Lockhart called out Harry to re-enact scenes from his heroic battle with the Wagga Wagga Werewolf.

Of course, Harry did his best to re-form himself into a werewolf. He gained a full meter in height and added something like two stone of muscle to his frame. When he began growing hair everywhere and reforming his face to a much more canine look, Lockhart actually screamed a little and with his voice cracking slightly said, "NO! No! I meant for you to er... retain your usual form. No need to frighten the other students!"

Harry took a brief look at the class, everyone seemed intrigued by his transformation, the only person not looking interested was Nym, who was wearing a very superior air, as if she felt she could do better, "Professor, they all look okay to me, I just thought I'd add a little authenticity. I can change my muscles density to something pretty close to a werewolf, so you should be able to show exactly how you put it down. You don't need to worry about me, I heal pretty fast so you shouldn't be able to hurt me."

The adult still looked like he might wet himself if Harry started growling, his look only got worse when a few of the other student made noises of agreement, "Err... well okay," he gulped audibly, "I suppose we could do that."

Harry finished the shift in his face from human to lycan, elongating his jaw considerably and expanding his teeth. The class was almost immediately treated to the surreal sight of a werewolf failing to fight off a huge sneeze, "AAAACHOOOO! ... Woah, sorry professor, your cologne is just really strong with a canine nose. More sensitive you know. Excuse me."

Nym briefly shifted her nose to match Harry's before sneezing herself in agreement.

Ignoring the fact that his students were roughly half his size, and in fact far too young for any technique to help them against an actual werewolf, Lockhart picked up his book with shaky hands and started in, "Well let's see, yes, the werewolf came directly at me, as Harry and I are oriented now, the beast was on all fours," Harry obligingly moved, "And it was charging full tilt at me."

Harry moved in an exaggerated manner towards the professor.

"I put both my hands together in a double fist, and as it came in range I struck its head to the side!"

Harry continued his exaggerated walk right up to the professor, who made a fist with his right hand, folded his left over it, and with a move worthy of Harry's favorite captain of the Enterprise, smacked him in the side of the head. Lockhart had put a bit of force into the blow, enough to make it convincing without hurting him, but Harry nearly stood back up in confusion.

Canine skulls connected more at the back of the skull than the bottom, as human do. The werewolf form carried that along, and coupled with it went a drastic expansion of upper body muscles, especially along the trapezius and deltoid muscles. It was why werewolves were able to run on all fours. A strike to the side of the head of a werewolf wouldn't be like a similar move on a human, the muscles around there just wouldn't let the head move very far laterally. The move Lockhart just described would have made the werewolf angry, and very little else.

He decided to let it go.

Lockhart continued, "The hit diverted the slavering monster to my left and into the ground!"

Harry followed the action the professor was excitedly describing, but his mind refused to stop pointing out that inertia just didn't work this way, at least not without a blow that would have broken both of the attractive wizard's forearms.

"While he was shaken by the blow I delivered a punishing kick to his chest, and finished it off with a stab to the neck with my trusty silver belt knife! "

The class erupted in applause, which seemed to make Lockhart expand where he stood. The man gave a wide bow as Harry made his way back to his seat. There were a lot of holes in that confrontation, he thought. It was possible for it to have happened that way, but it would require someone like him or a half-giant like Hagrid.

As he sat, Harry met Nym's eyes and saw her raise an eyebrow. Yep. She had spotted it too. The rest of the class was dedicated to the same material the book covered, namely the best ways to arrange one's hair during a fight, and how to not chip a nail during the same.

The metamorphs sighed.

* * *

><p>The week ended, and as it did, new trouble made its way into the friend's lives.<p>

Saturday morning they made their way up from the badger's dungeon home to the great hall for breakfast, and as they sat down Harry noticed something strange from the Gryffindor table.

The stares from the school had actually dropped off during the week, and the whispers that seemed to stop when Harry or any of the others entered the room also seemed to be happening less. When the legendary Hogwarts rumor mill figured out that Harry Potter was actually no different than Harry Bones had been (being harder to find when he didn't want to be notwithstanding), most people seemed content to just let it go. All of which was exactly why as they sat for breakfast two first year lions staring directly at harry, not moving, eating, or talking, seemed unusual.

Harry went for a normal porridge, Nym her favored bacon and eggs, Susan, Hannah, and Neville all preferred fruit, and Hermione went with coffee and toast. After a moment, Luna joined them at their table, a plain bacon sandwich adorning her plate as a pair of gentle bobbing and floating plums adorned her ears.

Harry sat next to Nym, and was playing his morning game of seeing how red he could turn Nym before she either threatened to, or just straight up stabbed him. Luna took the seat to Harry other side, and as he began floating all the bacon just outside her reach. With a smile, Luna removed her own wand and began floating the pieces closer to Nym, putting them inside her reach. Harry harrumphed and began working harder to make the rashers dance a bit farther away.

A smile pierced Nym's normal morning malaise as she elongated her arm slightly to snatch the pieces Luna floated closer.

After thoroughly distracting the pair of metamorphs from their daily breakfast game, Luna reminded Harry of his earlier observation, "I saw you noticed them earlier. They're still looking you know."

Harry lost concentration on his spell, the final piece of bacon he was playing with falling directly into Nym's eggs, splashing egg fragments onto her robes, "What do you mean?"

As Nym scowled and murmured _scourgify_, Luna indicated the table behind her where the young lions were still directing an unblinking gaze.

"Who are they? I remember the boy, he's something Creevey. He looked disappointed to be in Gryffindor when he was sorted."

Luna smiled as she responded, "Well if who he's sitting with is any indication, I know why."

Nym's floating blob of porridge danced above Harry's head as he said, "Well given the red hair she's probably a Weasley, but what's her name?"

The dreamy blonde's smile widened as the blob slowly descended towards the back of Harry's robes, "Her name is Ginerva. She prefers Ginny. The Weasleys live near me in Ottery St. Catchpole, I used to play with her when we were both younger. She is somewhat... obsessed with the boy who lived. She used to make me act out marriage ceremonies with her."

Harry's expression darkened, Luna's continued brightening.

"I received the honor of standing in for the esteemed Harry Potter. After her mum caught us re-enacting the wedding for the fourth time she never came over to play anymore."

"Well at least all the creepy stalker types are all gathering in one place. Makes avoiding them easier I suppose."

Luna made noises of agreement as lukewarm porridge found its way down the shirt boy sitting across from her. Her dreamy smile reached the limits of her face as his cries of indignation filled the air.

* * *

><p>Later that day, after bewitched porridge found its way inside Nym's shirt, retaliatory porridge was slung at Harry and hit Neville, Susan and Hannah conjured porridge all over both Harry and Nym for interrupting their teasing of their favorite male friend, and everyone took a shower and changed clothes again, Harry, Nym and Neville al went out to see Hagrid.<p>

The half-giant's dragon egg had hatched during the summer, and with the support of the centaur herd in the forest and a few of the wood nymphs who lived in the forest he had begun raising and training the Norwegian Ridgeback.

From letters Harry received in the messy scrawl of his oathsworn friend the family knew that the dragon was responding well to the love and training it was receiving from its somewhat unusual adopted family. Dragons, it seemed, were like highly intelligent, massive, and deadly dogs. They took direction well if started on it at an early age, and they loved to pee on trees.

Hagrid named his newest and arguably deadliest pet Norbert, and according to his letters was incredibly embarrassed when the chieftain of the centaur herd revealed that the dragon was in fact a female. It turned out that dragons imprinted on the first being they saw when they hatched, and that once named, they didn't take well to changes.

Overall, the three were really excited to meet Norbert the lady dragon.

So far the dragon hadn't been noticed by any regulatory body, and by the lack of reaction from the staff room they assumed that she had also escaped the notice of the headmaster. In an effort to keep that going, Hagrid met them at his cabin and led them deep into the forest. The acromantula were usually a big and deadly concern to anyone going into the forest, but with a fire-breathing dragon flying freely around the forest, the spiders had retreated to the absolute depths of their territory.

Before any of the three knew it, they happened into a massive clearing. At the center of it was a mound of rocks piled on top of one another. It was obviously a magical construction, as it was clearly a pile of rocks but a massive yawning hole was open on one side. A thin cloud of smoke continuously wafted from the top of the hole. The three teenagers shared a glance. No one needed the full three guesses to figure out where the dragon was being kept.

As they came closer, Harry began feeling a bit of the magic rolling off of the place. It was another presence like what he felt when he came back to Hogwarts, or what he felt when he went near the forest. As usual though, it was different. The pile felt... fiery? And it had a hint of something that was like the smell of dry ground right when it starts to ran. When you can see the drops of water fall from the sky and hit the ground, each raising its own small cloud of earth. Then there was a smidge, just a soupçon of something that felt like Hagrid.

If he had to guess, Hagrid and the centaurs had gotten together and built this shelter for the forest's new protector. And when Norbert moved in she brought the natural magic that filled a dragon with her.

It was interesting; Harry had to stop for a moment and close his eyes, drinking in the strange feelings.

"Norbert! Norby! Where are ya lass? I got a few new friend here ter meet ya!"

A large puff of smoke from the artificial cave answered Hagrid's call. After a moment, a massive scaled head poked out of the hole. Norbert was a deep and dark green, so dark it seemed like it was almost black. She blinked her eye a few times, as if adjusting to the light outside her home.

"C'mere, girl!," Hagrid called out as he clapped Harry on the shoulder, "This here's yer lord, without him someone woulda taken ye away from me. So just like we practiced now, yeah?"

At that the dragon left its cave and ambled over to the people. It moved slowly and calmly, which was excellent as there were at least three being present who would have soiled themselves should there have been any fast or suspicious movement.

When she got near the kids, she stopped and brought her great head down to the young one's eye level. turning her head to the side so he one massive eye peeked down at him, Norbert seemed to look deeply at Harry, as if weighing and judging him. Harry felt his blood pressure spike, Hedwig whispered calming nothings in the back of his head, and the small piece of him that was attached to Gabrielle seemed concerned. Norbert took an immense sniff of the boy, the strength of her breathing causing his robes to flutter and be pulled towards her. With another short look the she-dragon drew herself up to her full height.

Hagrid began grinning as the dragon lowered its head; bring one massive forelimb into its chest and folding a wing in alongside in what was unmistakably a bow.

Harry couldn't take it. He just broke down into laughter.

Norbert seemed to almost take offense, but as Hagrid joined Harry in his joyous laughter (Neville and Nym managing only quiet and scared chuckles), she seemed to catch the humor.

"Lady Norbert, I'll have you know I require one thing from all of my vassals, but from you, I will require two," Harry said in an overly pompous tone.

Norbert brought her head in close to the kids again, thoroughly spooking Neville and Nym again. The dragon wore an expression of unmistakable interest and questioning. She wanted to know what Harry wanted.

"I charge you with the protection of this forest and all of its inhabitants. Through Hagrid, I will always take care of you, but in exchange, you must protect this place."

Norbert's face withdrew a few feet as she looked down at her claws. She seemed to be weighing her options again before shaking her head in an unmistakable yes.

"Excellent! The other thing I require is something Hagrid has already done for me, but if you would grant me this boon I would be forever grateful."

The draconian head moved back in to the students and their massive escort.

Harry opened his arms wide and with his best puppy dog eyes called out to the dragon, "Hug?"

* * *

><p>After the first week ended, a fairly calm routine made itself known. The friends continued to do excellently in their classes, whether from genuine personal skill or from advice from some of history's foremost thinkers in most of the fields they studied.<p>

Godric's journals alongside James' brought the friends through transfiguration with flying colors. Ravenclaw and Lily did much the same for charms. Lily's notes contained a number of excellent insights into the potions brewing process, but sadly did not have wisdom about why exactly Harry's potions always seemed to fail in the worst possible manner.

When his withering potion nearly gassed the classroom after his swelling solution nearly formed a form of magical nitroglycerin, the friends gave up. The two theories they had were that either Professor Snape was trying to kill him, or his ability to make potions was literally cursed.

Defense turned into another joke class. Since the first day when Lockhart knocked himself out, they only seemed to reenact his exploits in class. His books were mostly about how to look good battling evil, but they were each suspiciously light on the battling evil part of the deal. The friends really hoped his class would be the part of his adventures that his books lacked, but two weeks was enough to teach them otherwise.

Harry and Nym shared their thoughts on the flaws in the pretty-boy's werewolf technique. Hannah was quick to point out that only a demi-human would even consider closing with a werewolf to begin with. Lycanthropy only affected 'pure' humans, so Lockhart would have to have been insane to consider hand to hand with one.

His other lessons had similar flaws in them. Only someone who was literally deaf could get close enough to a banshee to punch it. No known silencing spell was effective against their magically enhanced shrieks. His descriptions and pantomimes of tracking down a family of yeti were no less ludicrous. Yetis were known for their elusiveness. That only the vaguest rumors of their existence had ever reached the mundane world was proof enough of it. It would take a master woodsman to find and stalk a family group of them, and given the fact that the golden haired professor routinely tripped on his way down the stairs from his office, his stories stunk.

Either he was lying about how he did his feats, or he hadn't been the one to do any of them.

Hermione, Susan, and Hannah were quick to jump to his defense, but neither had counterclaims for the arguments Harry and Nym put forward.

Outside of class, the two creepy Gryffindor first years began following Harry around, and they didn't seem to stop their staring. Harry and Nym solved the issue by glamoring their robes to look like other houses' and morphing to other features. Luna simply laughed at them, and in a voice that said she knew something they didn't told them that it wouldn't be enough.

Harry and Nym went out to visit Hagrid every weekend.

All in all, it was a normal year. Right up until Harry's least favorite day of the year.


	19. Chapter 18: Something Annoyed This Way

Chapter 18: Something Annoyed This Way Comes

October thirty-first saw Harry break entirely from his usual schedule.

He _really_ hated Halloween.

Killing a troll was... fun? It had been fun, but after the fact, especially after Quirrell, he realized that was the first time he ever took a life. Troll hide had recognized uses, their blood had properties in potions, and the harvesting there-of was certainly an industry. All the same, they were very nearly sentient creatures. He didn't want to think about what would have happened to any of his friends if they had walked into the troll. Any girl using the bathroom on the second floor, which in a school of around a thousand wasn't crazy, would have died. Even with a real justification, it was still his first kill. He felt weird about it.

And it was also the day he had been sentenced to eight years in hell. The day he lost his folks. His birth dad would have been so much fun! His birth mum was so smart, her charms notes were scary good, and they really brought some of the complicated parts of the art of charms down to a level the friends could understand. Hell, using his mum's work as a kind of Rosetta stone, they could actually understand some of the things Rowena was talking about (Harry was bothered by the fact that a millennia old research journal's conclusion were not only still relevant, but actually still groundbreaking. The wizarding world needed a huge kick in the pants.)

Just the day before Harry got owls from Gringotts and his mum. It was time for their quarterly report, and included in it was more news from them on the Sirius front. Master Attorney K'Urg had sent along a personal message reporting that the lunar phase had yet to match up with the day of the month they needed to access the correct appeal form.

_They_ said no news was good news, and Harry was quickly beginning to believe _they_ were a bunch of idiotic jerks.

Finishing all of the family journals made Halloween suck that much harder. Harry really missed home. He wanted his mum. And he hated himself for being weak and wanting those things.

It was just a bad day for Harry.

Hannah, Susan, Nym, Hermione, and Neville all waited in the common room for him for thirty minutes before they realized that he had yet to leave badger territory. Normally he was up early on Saturdays to help the elves with breakfast. He usually came back in the common room about the time the rest of the friends would wake up and wait for them all to be ready before heading out.

Neville and the girls tentatively entered the second year boy's dorms to find his curtains drawn. After Nym and Susan (being the most familiar with his madness) ran every detection spell they knew over his curtains and found nothing, the friends opened them to wake their wayward leader.

Inside the four poster bed there was a pile of blankets and pillows two and half feet thick in a ball at the head of the bed. Nym began poking it gently to see if Harry was in there somewhere. The boy wasn't known for his being quiet or reserved, so everyone was actually rather worried about this.

After the poking rose in vigor to the point where Harry noticed it through his blanket based armor, the friends heard his voice call out from beneath the pile, "Fuck off."

"Language!" came the simultaneous response from Hermione and Susan.

They looked at each other embarrassedly as the pile of blanket chuckled, "I knew you would do that."

Harry cleared his throat, the effect being somewhat lessened through a foot and a half of cotton stuffed fabric, "But seriously, I'm not leaving bed. Today sucks, everything is terrible. I'll go be a human tomorrow. Halloween blows."

Susan took a seat on the bed next to the lump, "Come on, brother. You need to be with your family today. We know why you hate this day, but unless you plan to hide every Samhain from now till you die, you might as well get up with us."

"Don't wanna," the pile said with a little wiggle.

"Aren't you the one always pushing us to do things that are uncomfortable and deal with it?" Nym said, giving the hill of blankets an authoritative poke, "Bloody hell! ("Language!") Last week you made me and Nev hug a bloody poisonous dragon. I know how much today sucks for you, but you need to face it!"

Neville chimed in, "Yeah, if you are allowed to make me stand and be licked by a Norwegian Ridgeback, I get to make you come out today and do things."

Hannah broke in at that point, "One thing though, your mum owled Hermione and I, evidently she thinks we're responsible, and she told us we are on no account to let you get near a troll."

The heap wiggled more under Nym's increasingly violent poking, "You guys take all the fun out of moping."

* * *

><p>An hour later, after repeated attempts at persuasion, threats of violence, and eventually actual violence in the form of a pillow fight, Harry was up for the day. Surrounded by his friends, they made their way out of the dungeons and towards the Great Hall for a late breakfast.<p>

Hagrid sat at the end of the Ravenclaw table and was showing some of the firstborn the traditional way the pumpkins and other gourds were carved for the holiday. They were carved in grotesque faces representing the 'will-o-the-wisps' that could be seen over the moors, really just small disturbances in the barrier between this world and the next. One of the interesting things shared by the mundane and wizarding worlds, though of course with drastically different explanations for the same phenomena. Harry supposed that swamp gas seemed like a reasonable explanation if you had never heard of magic.

Harry sat next to the house ghost at the Hufflepuff table, Nym taking the seat across from him and the rest of the friends spreading around. For the day he expected to have, Harry felt that hanging out with ghosts would be poetic. He wasn't prepared for the conversation he overheard between the Gryffindor house ghost and their own translucent friar.

"It's your death-day old chum! Don't let those bawdy elf-skinned apple-johns get to you!"

The Gryffindor ghost's head seemed to slip slightly from his shoulder as he sobbed, "You don't understand, friend friar. I'm a knight! I was knighted in the court of the son of King Arthur himself, and I was knighted for saving young Amhr on a hunt!," he began gesturing wildly, "Amhr lay stunned, knocked from his steed by an errant branch, and unbeknownst to him the beaters in the brush were driving the hippogriff we hunted direct to him. I dismounted and with my horse and the lord behind me I stood against the fowl beast's charge, protecting him while his other men-at-arms drew him back up and found him his seat once more. We brought him straight back to Camelot, and with his healers beside him he knighted me on the spot. For me to not be included in the only hunt here on the other side is the greatest stain on my honor that could be."

The beknighted ghost shook in his terrible sad anger, dislodging his poorly secured head. In a sight that put nearly all of the friends off the breakfast, the head remained connected to his shoulders by a thin patch of skin. The ghost quickly righted his head, but the damage was done.

"Driving me to my death, I was struck forty-five times in the neck, and with a blunt ax no less! I can see that my head is not fully off, but by all of the gods and devils, I should be in head headless hunt!" the ghost shook a piece of what appeared to be ghostly paper (though neither knew it, both Harry and Hermione's minds stopped at the paper, trying to figure out how paper could die with enough unresolved tension to become a ghost).

"So they juggle their heads, so they play head polo, and so their games of head-snooker are considered the finest after-life entertainment on this side of the Atlantic Ocean! Just because I could never play Yorick in one of their renditions of young William of Shakespeare's Hamlet! Who wants to be a dead Danish court jester anyway! You are right friar," the ghost said with increasing anger, "To the final rest with the lot of them!"

The undead drama was compelling, Susan conjured some of her signature popcorn after she got over seeing the inside of a man's neck. Hannah and Nym who were beside her both stole popcorn from her, all three totally enraptured.

"Sir Nicholas de Mimsy-Porpington, you are too good for the like of those buffoons in the headless hunt. Friend, I say make your death the next chapter of your tale, if you were made in the hunt in life, I say leave the hunt behind in death," the fat friar said.

"Yes, my friend! I will have nothing more to do with those fawning beef-witted gudgeons! Come, let us speak with Griffy to ensure the refreshments are in order. He has told me that the elves set aside something called an 'enchilada' some months ago. It should be well rotted for the party this evening, and he has assured me it will be quite the treat!"

Harry had been sitting next to the pair for the whole conversation, torn between amusement and interruption. He could hold himself no longer.

"Sir Nicholas, if it isn't rude, have you ever considered having the small flap of skin at your neck cut? I'm certain it could be done. Magic is magic after all, sir."

The knight looked off in the distance, his legs halfway through the bench, caught as he stood to find an elf and a platter of rotten enchiladas, "I have been a ghost here in Hogwarts for about a thousand years now. I've been dedicated to helping the young find knowledge and enlightenment, hopefully so their ends would be better than mine. Never in that time has anyone considered cutting it. I don't even know how it could be done, it's commonly thought that the living cannot harm the dead."

Harry looked thoughtful for a moment, "What about exorcism spells? I will admit to having looked them up to threaten Peeves. There are cases of people having done them incorrectly and only partially exorcised the spirit in question. One done at low power and under tight control would take care of you."

There was fear in the old knight's gaze as he met the eyes of his friend, without looking at the still pre-teen wizard, "I appreciate the suggestion, but with respect, I would not let you make the attempt. The reason most of us are still on this side of the veil is our fear of what lies on the other side. No man knows of awaits us, and if you were to make a mistake, I cannot, I will not think on the consequences."

Sir Nicholas resumed his previous movement, but Harry was quick to interject, "No, you misunderstand sir. The spells for exorcism fall under the heading of charms, and you probably do not know this but their effect on the living is... distracting to say the least. Professor Flitwick won a number of duels through creative use of exorcism charms. If anyone alive has the ability to do this, short of seeking out a necromancer, our esteemed charms professor is the man who could."

The ghost looked unconvinced, so Harry was quick again to continue, "Sir, in the European dueling championship museum they have a pensieve playing constantly on repeat of a move he made where he performed a backflip over a ribbon cutting curse and as he was inverted above the spell he managed to nail a two inch wide gap between two stationary _fortis maximus_ shields with a low powered exorcism spell that left his target hallucinating flying squid attempting to mate with his fore-arms for the next hour and a half. If you ask him he will allow you to take part in a game of, as you called it, head snooker."

The ghost clearly had to take a moment to process the image Harry described, smile lit the faces of Susan, Nym, and Hannah next to Harry as they recalled the same image and their joy at being taught by such a man. With a brief nod, the ghost who had not five minutes previously decided to hang the headless hunt steeled himself and marched to the front of the hall.

Two minutes, half a thousand gasps, and a spell later, a newly headless ghost walked down the aisle in the middle of four silent tables and administered the creepiest high five the world had seen to that day. A whispered invitation to a deathday party later, the ghost left whispering with the fat friar about finding himself some parchment.

Harry briefly considered the logistics of ghost post (do owls have ghosts?) before returning to his breakfast. He knew today was going to be weird, or bad, or something. He liked his pile of blankets. He missed his pile of blankets.

* * *

><p>Lunch passed by several hours later without any significant issues. Harry credited that fact to his three hours of ignoring homework in favor of researching and practicing notice-me-nots.<p>

It wasn't easy on him though.

As he sought out his book from the library he had to quickly cast a glamour over the book to make it appear to be a standard dissertation on the theory behind the color changing charm.

As he sat Harry was forced to split his attention into three pieces. One had to pay attention to the discussion at the table of the color changing charm and their usual discussion of the strangest use any could conceive of for it. Another part of him had to pay attention to the parchment in front of his as he attempted to write a convincing facsimile of an essay on the theory of the charm. The final part was actively reading the book in front of him and soaking in the theory and intention of the notice-me-not.

One whiff of his plan and the girls would pounce on him like lions on a particularly fat gazelle. Normally he would intentionally let them know and set up a joke with Neville about how that particular takedown would work. Smiles and blushing would be the result, good times. But today was cursed. He needed to give himself some insurance against All-Hallows Eve.

As they practiced the wand motions, and found ways to shorten them or substitute them with a more intense focus (it continually bothered him that Hermione never made a motion quicker or faster, she was all textbook all the time, and she was really snooty about it), Harry purposefully flubbed the movements into the closest approximation to that of the notice-me-not that he could without attracting undue attention to the mistake. He was unsure if it was his skill or the intention behind the movement, but his friends didn't notice.

As they began casting, Harry changed the colors of his targets to match the pale beige of the table they worked on. As he cast more and more the friends payed less attention to his work, and shortly he was hiding the empty ink bottle they were using from the notice of his friends.

Finally, twenty minutes before the meal was to begin, Harry began what he thought of as gathering his power. After a few moments of concentration, trying to bring everything he had to the surface, he cast a notice-me-not on himself, and effectively disappeared from the table.

Writing a quick note to put at his place on the table so his friends would not freak out too badly, Harry quickly stood and moved behind the nearest shelf.

Nym was the first to notice, which gave Harry a warm feeling he found difficult to understand. She gasped as she realized that he wasn't sitting there any longer. Harry was certain her control over her arm was entirely unconscious as it whipped across the table from her position on the other side and two seats down, elongating half a meter to snap up the note he left.

She glanced at it for a moment before exploding, "THAT STUPID PIECE OF HIPPOGRIFF SHIT INFUSED NIFFLER FUC-MMMPPHH!"

Hannah seemed to perform her own magical arm extension as she clasped a hand over the furious metamorph's mouth, Luna audibly sighed in disappointment. Hannah managed to reduce the girl down to a dull roar, which on its own was an impressive feat. Harry knew perhaps too well Nym's ability to contort and expand her throat and voice box to produce some truly terrifying noises. An authoritative _silencio_ later the metamorph was back to raving, and if Harry's skill in lip reading meant anything, he felt certain she had picked up a few words from Luna and a score of Irish dock workers. The amused blonde, for her part, took out a parchment and quill. She began taking notes on Nym's cursing with a gleam in her eye.

His note was passed around the table, Susan face-palming, Hannah frowning, Hermione looking angry, and Neville laughing slightly at his friend's antics.

"Harry, we understand why you did this. You're an idiot, we hate you, but we know why you did this. And you're right, we would have stopped you, and you know we still might because _FINITE_!" she said, pointing her wand directly behind her.

Harry was glad that he thought that she would think that he would think of him being a smartass, because having gone three levels in and Hannah having only gone two meant he had chosen to hide behind the shelf behind his seat and not hers.

Harry had to physically shake his head to stop that set of recursive thoughts from just continuing on ad-infinitum.

The rest of the table caught on in an instant and began firing _finite_s all around, one clipping Nym and resulting in the end of her tirade becoming audible, "-grandmother ass-tick infested boy! I'm gonna kill you!"

Her final exclamation drew the ire of Madam Pince (Harry was more glad than usual that he was outside normal visibility, he had kept up a rather good relationship with the normally tetchy librarian) and resulted in the whole group being tossed out on their ears.

Harry followed them through the halls to the great hall, taking a place at the table a few places down from them. He spent the whole meal in stitches as the friends all spent the meal unobtrusively sending finishing charms all over the hall. Four sets of serious acne issues, one set of glamoured robes over a _very _naked seventh year Ravenclaw girl, three hair colors and more than a score of hastily reapplied make-up charms were all canceled to Harry's extreme amusement.

Eventually the friends tired of their hunt (read: collapsed in laughter as a certain glamour was cancelled on a rather buxom young lady) and merely ate their lunch. Hannah spent the lunch hour reviewing basic healing spells out loud, harry guessed in an effort to ensure he didn't hurt himself somehow before his spell expired. Truth be told, the only spells he directly needed were some pretty extreme stabilization or triage charms, and most of them weren't things you could apply to yourself. He also realized after some thought that his rather unique changes to his own biology would be pretty dangerous to him if someone who was unaware of them tried anything invasive in an effort to heal him.

After lunch the friends headed back to the library and moved from their charms to potions. Luna was on a basic bruise salve, and the rest were on a form of calming potion. Hannah was leading the study, and Nym was providing back up.

The key to most of the medical potions was an understanding of the effect of the reagents on the biology of the potions target, and Nym's ability to make small portions of her skin and organs invisible made an excellent demonstration. Interestingly the majority of the class work they covered in potions were healing related salves, tinctures, and draughts. Harry supposed that it couldn't be said that Hogwarts didn't prepare one for life outside its walls.

Taking a seat at the table next to their Harry followed their work with his own. He just wanted to be invisible for Halloween, it didn't mean he was willing to let the people important to him out of his sight, or that he wanted to be left behind in their classwork.

* * *

><p>Three hours passed and the group moved en masse down to the kitchens. Harry arranged with a few of his elven friends just after breakfast for them to have a small feast of their own before the death day party Sir Nicholas had Invited them to. The plan was for them to have the same foods that would be at the party, as Luna assured them that sharing the experience of the food with the ghosts would improve the whole party experience.<p>

It was generally understood by the friends at this point that Luna's forte was the weird, and despite Hermione's insistence that the small blonde be immediately checked out by a mundane psychiatric professional at the earliest opportunity, they all decided to go with her advice.

A full batch of enchiladas and a bit of spotted dick later (the two working curiously well together), the group was all off to the dungeon where the old English knight had decided to celebrate his death.

As they entered the dungeons and the small hallways leading to each, Harry had to weather another assault of finishing charms. Thankfully when the friends became bored with putting him through a good round of dodging and hiding practice (Luna nailed him a number of times but she had chosen tickling and clothes tightening charms, though how the hell she caught his underwear was beyond him), Harry conjured himself a small towel and they entered the room Sir Nick directed them to.

It was a huge place, easily twenty by fifty meters. Along the west wall was the buffet the elves and Sir Nick had spoken of, and it was revolting. Apparently ghosts left food out so it could spoil and the flavor could intensify and as they passed through it they could get a sort of full body taste of it. The enchiladas were a terrifying and moldy hit.

There was an undead four piece orchestra in one corner, and several score ghosts floating around the nominal dance floor in a number of different formal dance styles. Across from the dance floor, Sir Nicholas himself was astride a steed and engaging in a round of head juggling.

The whole group put aside arguments over how exactly a cello died and came back as a ghost in order to watch a different group of headless riders smack a head around with ghostly polo sticks. Harry had no earthly idea what polo was or how it was played, but if the fourteen headless riders crashing into each other and decapitating one another with long clubs was any indication, he would gladly buy season tickets.

Harry watched as Nick laughed and smacked the head off of a man who had introduced himself as Sir Patrick. He seemed like a bit of a jerk, but hey, who was he to judge. Besides, he had Luna to do that for him (crusty puss filled dick bag was the phrase she used, Hermione looked like she was about to faint). He leaned against the edge of the food table and made small talk with Peeves, who seemed to see through the notice-me-not.

Peeves was a surprisingly good conversationalist, for a two foot tall insane spirit of a long dead Irishman that was constitutionally incapable of anything resembling grammar. Harry frowned for a moment, that had sounded meaner than he had intended. As Peeves waxed poetic about the finer points of sticking charms and notice-me-not spells used in conjunction with forehead level ropes and crotch level spring-packed boxing gloves, Harry actually conjured a small notebook and began writing a few tips down. Despite the notes and journals Harry had, Peeves had been active for almost as long as Hogwarts had been around, so he had forgotten more about magic than Harry would likely know for at least another six months, year at the most.

The friends were spread out among the party. Nym was dancing with Luna, Nev, Susan and Hannah were on a bench avidly watching a round of head juggling, and Hermione was speaking to a ghost about something (Harry put money on the 'dead instrument' debate). As the poltergeist he was talking to got into the fun that could be had with passworded sticking charms and notepad drawings of abnormally proportioned genitals, Harry heard a voice and knew immediately that his day had finally made the turn towards sour he was expecting.

"_Kill... tear... rip... so hungry, soooo hungry..._"

"And the keys that you haves to make sure the dongsy-wongsy is twice as wide as-"

"Shit! Peeves, you hear that?"

"Does Peevsy-Weevsy hears what? Maybe some hisses? Do you hears hissing? Is it a fart? Does ghosts fart?"

The poltergeist actually began to float away, lost on the unfortunate winds of his musings. Harry moved towards the voice he heard, absentmindedly enlarging his ears and shaping them for better reception. As he walked towards the noise and sharpened his aural sense, he heard more strange grumbling, and what seemed like a general scraping noise.

"_So hungry. Why do I listen to damn wizards? Stuck in a damn dungeon for so long. You let one wizard heal you after picking a fight with cockatrice, and then you have to kill on his command for a thousand years... Bloody assholes._"

The scraping noise paused and then seemed to repeat without moving forward any appreciable distance, the voice chimed in with an explanation as soon as Harry began to wonder.

"_Ahhh... That's itched forever! Even with a damned millennia of time to kill, the hard to reach spots still get you._"

The voice started moving through the wall again, and Harry was more confused than ever. It couldn't be a ghost now, if it itched it had a physical form, but what else could it be? The voice stopped voicing its concerns, leaving Harry to his musing about what could live for a thousand years and still itch. He followed the scraping up from the dungeon, through the ground floor and then, strangely, directly up a staircase to the first. As he walked forward matching the scraping, it suddenly seemed to go vertical.

"_I smell blood! Gods above, these filthy wizards. I_ smell_ blood, can't they clean anything?_"

And now Harry was back to really worried. Rip-kill-tear had turned into some kind of disgruntled grumbling, but now it smelled blood. Whoever invented Halloween deserved a nice solid kick in the goolies, he decided. Also Voldemort? Whose fault was it that things always happened on this day of all days?

Hogwarts whispered to him when he needed a route sometimes, so running full out now, Harry vaulted a handrail and made a two meter drop onto a moving staircase that in a moment led directly to the corridor the voice moved into. Harry was halfway down it in a flash, scanning the hallways as best he could while ignoring the sounds of the feast nearing completion two floors below and the noises his own feet were making as he sought out 'rip-tear-kill'.

Harry ignored the other side of the second floor, he had heard the voice go to the one he was on. It took the better part of five minutes, but he combed all of the usually traveled areas of the second floor, blocking off hallways with small illusions that asked people to find a detour. When he finished with the well-traveled he moved to the paths less traveled, and having made that decision, he found his target in about thirty seconds.

The whole hallway near the bathroom normally haunted by 'Moaning Myrtle' (actually a rather nice girl named Myrtle Haywood, you just needed to get past the whole died as a teenager in a snit thing) was covered in water. Harry actually took almost a meter to skid to a top as he came to it. The scraping noise and the voice were gone, but it had talked about smelling blood and if he had to guess...

Written in still shining blood on the wall across from the bathroom was the phrase 'THE CHAMBER OF SECRETS IS OPENED. ENEMIES OF THE HEIR BEWARE.'

"Bloody hell."

It was all he could think to say. The chamber of secrets. He knew he should have put more time into finding it. There was a reason it was on his to do list. Hell, he had gotten McGonagall to smile, why hadn't he actually searched out Slytherin's secret room?

Harry stood there staring at the wall for an untold amount of time, overwhelmed by the implications of what he was seeing. At least he knew that the 'rip-tear-kill' thing was unrelated to the blood, BLOOD smeared on the bloody WALL! Who or what 'donated' that? Sweet fancy Moses. Slytherin had left the founders for a reason, the man had been absolutely bonkers. A syphilitic brain combined with significantly above average magical power was a terrible combination, though to their credit both Godric and Helga had warned him off of his fascination with French brothels.

In the final days before he accepted his exile, he told the others that he layered a lot of final protections around the place in case of attack. His contributions to the war wards around the castle were _brutal_, and the other three founders took almost a month tracking down the intention base wards he left in the hallways after a student nearly lost all of their skin for sending a tickling jinx at a friend in another house.

If this message was real, it was going to be an interesting year.

Harry was rudely pulled from his thoughts by the ever-unwanted sound of Malfoy yelling, "Enemies of the heir beware; you'll be next mudbloods!" from four feet away.

He looked up and noticed that the hallway was filled with students, all of whom had apparently taken his detours to heart and ended up with him in the normally deserted passage next to Myrtle's bathroom. Harry absently flicked his wand twice in the blond idiot's direction (pausing for a moment to reflect that this year that statement had to be qualified, what with Lockhart on the loose), resulting in a _silencio_ and a mild banisher both impacting on the boy's chest.

Having silenced and punched the idiot in the chest, Harry began taking a serious look around. He had been consumed by the sight of the blood and missed a number of things, like a stiff Mrs. Norris hanging from a torch sconce next to the bathroom door. A short poke told Harry that the poor kneazle mix was stiff beyond what a _petrificus_ would do, and an enhanced ear pressed to her side told him that she was alive, just under a draught of the living death style effect. Deciding that he could safely leave the medical attention of a cat to the school, Harry turned his attention to the message.

Harry fired off a notice-me-not on the door to the bathroom, and stepping inside of it to ensure he didn't draw attention to himself, shot off a _scourgify_ at the bloody words on the wall. To no effect. With a glare he tried an _evanesco_, to a similar lack of cleaning result. Harry's glare intensified. _Skurge_ had nothing positive to contribute, a trio of spells designed to degrease industrial accidents had no effect, and finally a short ritual taken from Harry's favorite book, _The Burning Man Saga_, created by the Burning Man shaman to clean the salt flats at the end of the week (and time compressed month for the magical side of the event) still had no effect.

While he was trying to do the man's job, Filch had come by and waxed poetic over the not-quite-corpse of his feline companion. Dumbledore had followed shortly thereafter with his old grandfather routine, and Lockhart offered his office after some truly brutal speculation over the cause of the stunning/petrifaction that the cat was under (honestly, anyone with eyes could see Filch was distraught, why would you say it looked like a Lebanese torture coma and that it was too late to give the anti-curse?).

Eventually Harry gave up, mostly because his last resort was to take out the Goblin forged Potter Blade and scratch off the letters and that would only serve to scratch the words into the stone of the wall.

He made his way to the badger's sett, intent on going to sleep. Halloween had gone sideways again. Again! Next year he wasn't going to leave bed, no matter what his friend's said. He tapped the correct barrel, and crawled his way into the common room. As soon as the door closed behind him he was hit with five different finishing spells and hauled to his feet.

Nym punched him in the shoulder (Harry saw it coming and discretely changed the skin on his arm to iron, only to find Nym had gone for tungsten and in the end it still stung) and then pulled him into a tight hug.

"You stupid god damned idiot! We were so worried, then the heir thing, what were we supposed to think!"

The others did the same, Susan, Hannah, and Neville all making a group hug of their turn. Harry sighed when they were done. He knew he shouldn't have left bed.


	20. Chapter 19: Love, Potions, and Quidditch

Chapter 19: Of Love, Potions, and Quidditch

The same day Harry hid himself in plain sight and attempted to confront a scary voice that evidently only he could hear, Amelia Bones and Andromeda Tonks each called off work and spent the day with six liters of fire whisky and each other.

In the same way that Harry hated Halloween for being awful and reminding him of what he lost, Amelia and Andi loathed the day for what it reminded them of and what it cost them. Andi lost her husband in a Diagon Alley raid in the summer of '80. Amelia lost her fiancé the day after All Hallows Eve, and she lost her parents, and her Susan's parents to the asshole formerly known as Voldemort.

With the singular exception of the last year (due entirely to the now infamous troll incident, which was _still_ making the rounds in ministry gossip circles) the two ladies had a tradition. It started Halloween of '83 when the two had gone together on a short pub crawl through downtown London. Three bars in, and six beers, four shots, and a martini from a nice lad from the University of Westminster deep, they decided to crash at Andi's place (it being a much closer trip).

They got to her place, and with Amelia being in no place to apparate or floo, and the Ossuary being something like a three hundred pound cab ride away, they decided it would be best for her to spend a night on the couch. They talked, they laughed, and they spent more than a bit of time crying.

At 1:56 am on the first of November 1983, Amelia leaned in towards her friend met on the Hogwarts express before their first year, and to stop her from another self-recrimination about sending her husband for shriveling figs that day in 1978, she kissed her.

It was messy. It was drunken. In Amelia's expert opinion it tasted like the cheap shitty IPAs that Andi loved so much flavored with just a hint of fire whisky, but for a woman who hadn't been physically intimate in over two years (novelty vibrating wands set firmly aside) it was like manna from heaven. For Andi, whose husband died almost five and a half years before, it was worth even more.

The two had amazing and terrible drunk sex all night long, collapsing of exhaustion as the sun's rays pierced the blinds that separated the two witches from the outside world. They slept cuddled fiercely into one another. Their post coital embrace was as needy as the actions that inspired it, and when they woke around eleven hours later their Samhain completed itself with joint groans inspired by a shared hangover with enough power to kill lesser beings.

Since that night, they had a firm tradition. October 31st they touched up their features with a few well-chosen glamours, and headed out to any of the dozen shitty bars near the University of Westminster (in honor of the nice bloke from their first night together) where they made their yearly joint terrible decisions. A few times they blew off their tension with each other, occasionally they found a lucky college lad and made his night. It didn't much matter what they did, because they also just went home. The point was that they were each supporting the other through the reminder of the horror they fought. They had a family identity. It was what they needed, and yeah, it was a little weird.

Amelia had on more than one occasion deeply questioned how she had ended up in a strange relationship with her fiancé's cousin, but it kept both of them sane over the intervening years. They were both single mothers in demanding positions, they had both lost the man they loved. It was enough.

Their 1992 reunion was colored by the fact that they now knew Sirius was innocent, and that he wouldn't be getting out of jail any time soon. But life was life, was life. Que sera, sera, as the Spaniards were so fond of saying.

* * *

><p>Samhain was painful. Samhain raised a lot of questions. It took Nym two weeks and cost Harry seventy three galleons and five solid pounds of Swedish gnome-made exotic chocolates, but Samhain at Hogwarts passed.<p>

Life, as it was wont to do, continued apace.

Rumors swirled around the castle about the evident petrifaction of one of the single most hated feline specimens in the thousand year history of Hogwarts, and there were two rumors in particular competing for the top slot of most widely believed. The first held that the Weasley twins had finally had enough and decided to show the world exactly what they thought of meddling animals and ineffective general custodians. The second was that Filch had attempt certain unmentionable and unforgivable acts on his _creepily_ beloved companion, and the cat in question had so rejected the elderly man's advances that she had petrified herself through the use of heretofore unseen accidental kneazle magic. The words scrawled in 'blood' on the wall threw some people off, but nearly everyone wrote it off as a prank. Either from the terror twins, or from Filch himself in a cover-up.

Harry knew it all had something to do with 'rip-tear-kill' as he had taken to calling the voice, but he secretly supported and helped spread the second rumor. It was an incredibly guilty pleasure, but he couldn't resist. He personally had nothing against Filch, having no reason to break any real rules in the castle and Hufflepuff house on the whole having a good relationship with the man; he just couldn't resist perpetuating the idea of human-kneazle sexual congress. That was exactly the kind of insanity that made his day.

In general the castle wasn't worried about a cat finding itself sharing some qualities with the common stone on a day known the magical population of the world as one where crazy things just happened. Inevitably the students found that comparing the eating habits of Ron to similar habits long held by the castle's resident squid was a more interesting pastime. Just like speculating about who exactly was behind the stupid grin Eloise Midgen had begun wearing during meals, the same girl whose face had scandalously been rearranged into a more pleasing form when she accidentally cursed a portion of it off in an attempt to stop a bad case of acne _she_ claimed had come about as a result of stress surrounding classes and_not_ as a result of her concern over being repeatedly rejected by Justin Finch-Fletchley who was...

Life just went on. Harry began semi-consistently beating up pairs of fifth years in defense practice, and the friends casually delved deeper into Rowena's research notes in their off time.

Really the only issue after Nym forgave Harry was that life moving on brought them into contact with the normal fire and brimstone dangers of being a student at Hogwarts.

* * *

><p>Potions class was going from bad to worse. They had brewed three different potions in class so far, spending a few days on the theory before each. Snape's method of 'lecture' left something to be desired. The man sat at the front of the room, periodically flicking his wand at the chalkboard and updating the instructions or lesson. He showed all his information only once and updated quickly, so his class was filled usually by the noise of frantically scratching quills.<p>

The class's next project was a hair-raising potion which, while really only a lame prank, served to illustrate the importance of rat tail in brews relating to any form of natural fiber, like hair. Harry was worried though because he had no desire to make another possibly dangerous mistake.

Potions with rat tail as a base ingredient had some impressive and terrifying qualities if prepared incorrectly. As a base it made a thick and very viscous concoction, and if reacted in the presence of fluxweed it formed what was widely recognized as an incredibly hearty semi-sentient fungus that rapidly began to eat away at whatever it touched. As luck would have it, the hair-raising potion did require fluxweed.

Basically if his uncharacteristically bad fortune in potions held, he was looking forward to having to lose a number of skin layers and possibly be forced to regenerate a number of his more sensitive organs until he could overcome the natural magic of the fungus if it managed to get into his bloodstream. He didn't want to think about what would happen to anyone with less ability or experience than him in realm of biological self-control.

To that end before their class for brewing the potion Harry spent an extra hour of study in the library finding any kind of runic enhancement, basic enchantment, or other thing he could do to his cauldron and equipment to make a safer trip into Snape's domain. Thankfully his self-assigned project was something that all of the friends saw value in, so as he did his research he had the book processing machine codenamed Hermione to his left, and the witch whose very existence spoke of the 'other' to his right (Luna curiously taking notes from a book on the wizarding response to the Blitz during the fight against Grindelwald).

It turned out that there were a large number of things he could do to stabilize or protect his potions work. There were in fact four separate books (oddly enough, all published by Gryffindor alums claiming that their classes with house Slytherin inspired their work). Runes comprised a large number of the possible solutions, but every one of the books warned that without training runes were more likely to kill you than do literally anything else. They were quickly written off as a solution to the problem.

Enchantments were covered only very briefly due to their complexity. The act of enchanting was convincing the innate magic of a substance that is had other properties. In brooms it was convincing wood and bristles that they were a lot lighter than they were in reality. In magic carpets it was the same. Self-stirring rods for potions, self-scrubbing brushes in cleaning, and a large number of other things all revolved around the same principle which evidently took years to learn. Harry was really intrigued by the idea, but being that they had something like seventeen hours and not the seven months it claimed was necessary to become even basically proficient, it too was shot down as a solution.

The actual solution to the problem turned out to be, ironically enough, potions based. One Gryffindor alumnus found two separate potions to coat one's cauldron in that solved Harry's main concerns. One covered the entire base of the cauldron in a clear coating that created a sort of, for lack of a better term, pacification field. Inside the influence of the potion violent ingredient reactions happened at something like one thousandth the speed they normally would, leaving a considerably larger amount of time to correct anything going wrong.

The other potion left a ruby red stain around the upper rim of the cauldron and acted like a kind of magical repellant. Any kind of magically rich object (read: potions ingredient) around one's cauldron would be repelled, only something dropped in directly from above the center of the cauldron wouldn't be affected, meaning no more sabotage. Or at least no more simple sabotage. It wouldn't be hugely effective given that the Ravens generally had more sense than to disrupt a potion contained in the same small and non-ventilated space as themselves, but it gave Harry a bit more peace of mind.

The only downside is that both potions required a considerable amount of crushed moonstone, a milky white chalk-like rock that formed on the rim of inactive volcanoes during the height of a new moon. It was consequently expensive, and all of the friends together only had enough to brew one batch of the potions.

In an unused classroom near the east wing of the school, the friends got together and under the watchful eyes of Hannah, Hermione, and Neville, Harry brewed up the pacification and repelling potions. They finished a bare fifteen minutes before curfew, with Harry having done a job that altogether they felt deserved at least an exceeds expectations.

* * *

><p>The Hufflepuff second year brewing days always fell on double potions periods, and their double potions periods always occurred first thing after breakfast. Harry, Nym, Hannah, Neville, Susan and Hermione separated from Luna after breaking their overnight fast, their parting marked by no small amount of laughter on Luna's part for what would undoubtedly be an incredibly dreary next two and a half hours.<p>

The friends went down to the dungeons, arriving about ten minutes before the class was to start. The Ravenclaws (possibly out of some kind of house pride, possibly because the house of the intelligent tended to attract masses of the same kind of schedule and rule obsessed people) were all already there, several showing signs of having been sitting on the dungeon floor against the wall for some time. Harry and company represented most of the second year Hufflepuff crowd, but the few that were outside the social circle they constructed arrived soon after them.

Right on time, and if you asked Harry with an incredibly annoying sense of the dramatic, Snape opened the door leading to the dungeons. There was a single tense moment where the man loomed over the twelve year old students he was teaching before he swept his arm and cloak to the side, allowing the children to enter the classroom single file, each passing beneath his gaze and mere inches from him.

Brutally suppressing ill thoughts of the professor's personal grooming habits, Harry entered and found a seat along the right hand side of the room. Nym took the spot next to him, Neville and Hannah the spots behind him, and Hermione and Susan the spots in front of him.

Harry and the rest of the class all began assembling their potions equipment in front of them silently, each knowing well the amount of points they would lose if they should make any kind of significant noise. The tall and brooding professor strode to the front of the room and the desk he kept there. With a swish and flutter of his cloak, he flicked his wand at the board, revealing the full directions to the Hair-raising potion that would be their target for the day.

"Begin."

Harry removed the ingredients from his stores, and what he lacked he took from the classroom reserves. Internally he felt annoyed that they didn't have access to the stores outside class hours, which would have let all of the friends be safer instead of just himself.

Crushing the vermin tails with vigor, he combined them with water and finely sliced strips of levitating lily. The combo began bubbling slowly, as it should, and Harry increased the heat to let it simmer slightly before he began making fine squares of Venezuelan newt skin and draining the vitreous humor from common tree frog eyes. As the lily and rat tail fully reacted in the water, they combined to form a thick and dark orange liquid. Harry dripped the creepy liquid from the frog eyes into the orange mix, watching as each drop made a sharp green accent in the liquid. As the potion color became more brown, Harry gently added square after square of newt skin, one at a time, to his brew. When he finished, he upped the temperature one more time and left the mix to simmer again while he muddled the fluxweed in a very small beaker of pure alcohol.

At this stage in the process, Harry could afford to sit back for a moment and look around. The hair-raising potion required fairly precise timing based on the heating and color of the potion for about the first fifteen minutes of the process. Following that, it had to simmer at increased heat for a solid five minutes before the danger of the fluxweed was introduced. Harry came out of his laser-like focus on his potion to catch the tail end of a whispered diatribe about his ability to cut things into squares, and how his sloppiness was so much like his father's.

After the first lesson of Snape's increased anger at him (a small part of him regretted being outed as a Potter again) Harry had become incredibly proficient at tuning the oddly obsessed professor out. Something that had Hermione up in arms, she was concerned he would miss something important if he continually tuned the 'bloody batty sweat soaked ball of gillyweed dregs' (as Luna preferred) out. Harry had little confidence in the man's ability as a professor though. All Snape's teaching came through the board at the front of the room, anything he said could be ignored.

Glancing quickly past the professor to Hannah and Nev behind him Harry got a brief thumbs up, indicating that as far as both had been able to see, he had done everything correctly. His shoulders lost a milligram of their tension as he prepared himself for the next, and most dangerous, part of the potion they would make today.

The next step, the introduction of the alcohol containing the muddled fluxweed, was done when the potion stopped giving off a gentle amethyst colored gas and turned back to a dark orange color. Harry paused to admire the beauty of the vapor drifting off of his cauldron, and especially how the ruby tinted edge of his cauldron looked in the torchlight and smoke. In a moment like this, he could see what would attract a man to become a potions master. It was oddly like the speech Snape had given their first day. It depended on what you did, but there really was a kind of beauty in a softly simmering cauldron.

Quite suddenly, Harry's potion stopped giving off its gas and with a slow clockwise stir turned back to its original dark orange color. Behind him he felt more than heard Snape break off of his muttered criticism and as he looked toward his fluxweed preparation to grab it, he missed the brief flicker surrounding his cauldron.

Harry lowered the intensity of the flame beneath his cauldron with a brief movement of his wand, and with his left hand began pouring the fluxweed into his cauldron. The alcohol had absorbed a considerable amount of matter from the fluxweed, so as he tipped the newly viscous mix into his potion Harry looked at the rim of his cauldron to assure himself that his protections were in place.

But they weren't.

The rim of his standard pewter cauldron no longer bore a tell-tale ruby sheen to it. This was a different cauldron. This wasn't his cauldron. As he helplessly watched the fluxweed he poured leave the rim of the beaker and fall toward the potion, his mind finally drew a line connecting a large number of dots he had never considered related.

Their first potion of the year, an acne clearing cream. It gave off a lot of fumes just before its most volatile stage, and just before he added the hippogriff claw he had seen his cauldron flicker for an instant. Their second potion, a swelling solution, it also smoked just before the stage where it could become incredibly reactive and cause damage. And like their first potion, if one put in too much of the most active reagent it would cause the brew to make the transition to an unstable and explosive state. The third potion of the year, the withering mix, it gave of a lot of vapors, but the addition of its final ingredient could cause the finalized mixture to vaporize and become a potentially deadly withering gas.

All of his mistakes had been in clouded rooms where one could easily miss the tell-tale flicker of a switching spell. All of them had been in a place in the brewing process where too much of the next ingredient in proportion to the earlier ingredients caused the whole thing to become deadly. All of his mistakes had occurred when Snape stood directly behind him, hands concealed beneath the man's voluminous robes.

It _was_ sabotage. His professor was trying to kill him. Or at least get him to kill himself and the people around him.

With wide eyes filled with terror, Harry watch as his fluxweed hit the surface of his mix. He watched as the fluxweed collected at the surface, and he watched as it turned a horrible black and began expanding rapidly.

The fungus he had been afraid of lept from his cauldron as it became too big to fit inside the small pewter vessel. Harry turned to see a look of unbridled glee of his professor's face. He closed his eyes, waiting to feel the pain of having first his robes, then his skin, and then his insides eaten away by a mindless god damned mushroom.

He waited in vain.

Nym was rapidly approaching the part of the brewing process where she needed to add the fluxweed. Harry had been adamant that they all be careful. The stupid boy hadn't told her exactly why she needed to be careful, but the looks on Hannah and Hermione's faces told her to not ask too many questions.

She leaned over to her cauldron, peering into it from just above and to the side. The bubbling of the cool purple gas looked like it was slowing down, and as soon as it stopped she could add the fluxweed mix. Neville mentioned that muddling the fluxweed would be excellent practice for something called a 'mojito' when they got older, but she had never heard of it.

Nym grimaced as she thought about it further. Neville had been so quiet last year, he really spent too much time with Harry, whose insanity as she well knew, corrupted absolutely. The smiles both boys wore when they mentioned the 'mojito' things had been too innocent and she didn't trust it. Those stupid boys were trouble alright.

As she felt a wet weight hit the back of her robe near her neck, she felt justified in her previous line of thought. This was serious! Trust Harry to spill something on her as a joke when he had been talking the whole day before about all the things that could go wrong with this potion. Stupid bloody...

As she turned her head to give the smarmy git next to her a piece of her mind, Snape be damned, her whole back started to feel a too warm and kind of wet sensation. She saw Harry's scrunched expression, as if he was expecting to be hit, and his cauldron looking like a dung bomb had gone off inside it. She quickly connected the sensations she was feeling to what Harry had actually said the day before, and as the nerves all along her back registered that something was dissolving and consuming her skin, Nym's terror and pain filled scream filled the enclosed classroom.

* * *

><p>It was now just past midnight in the hospital ward.<p>

Shadows stretched across the too white open floor, the moon's light casting black caricatures of the privacy screens that separated each bed from one side of the room to the other.

The friends had all left the room hours earlier, but the chairs they had used still surrounded Nym's bed. One of the chairs, the one next to her head on her right, creaked quietly into the mostly empty room. The only evidence of the boy and the bird underneath 'Death's Own' invisibility cloak sitting a quiet vigil over their fallen friend.

The fungus had burned through the skin across her entire back, even eating through a small amount of her spine before it could be neutralized by a frantic Madam Pomfrey. Her screams as she tried her best to transfigure the fungus inside of her to something harmless, and when that failed, as she tried to put a layer of metal between the fungus and the rest of her flesh still haunted the boy at her side.

His eyes hadn't left her motionless form since he had left the badger's sett and made his way to the hospital wing. Hedwig had met him as he passed into the room, alighting on his shoulder and ducking her head underneath the cloak. Harry was sure that Pomfrey knew someone was there. The cloak was good, but it would get him through the occupancy wards he knew blanketed the room without notice.

He waited silently for her to move, and for her to gain consciousness again. Part of it was pragmatic, she would need his help to get all of the aspects of her spine back into the right proportions. More of it was emotional though. Sabotage or not, his stupid fucking fungus had hurt her. All of the evidence of what was going on was right in front of him, but it took his creation of a nearly self-aware and angry mushroom to make him connect all the dots. He needed her to tell him that she didn't blame him.

Harry had been safe for a few months over two years now. It was something he was thankful for every day. It didn't erase his memory of the time he had spent at number four privet drive though. Having people he loved, and having people who loved him was something that he had sworn to himself he would never take for granted. He had decided very early in his days at the Ossuary that it was way too important for that.

Now one of those people was face down on a hospital bed in front of him, covered in bandages, anti-fungal agents, phoenix tears, and high-end healing salves.

He was marked for his time in hell by a kind of casual insanity. What other human was an accepted and valued house elf? What other person casually kills a full grown mountain troll because their wand made them feel antsy? Or literally punches through a man's head? Harry was a metamorph, he knew every part of himself, and that included the extent to which his entire ability to interact with the world was colored by the fact that he placed no value on his own continued existence. It was what let him do the things he did. It left him entirely dedicated to the people who had taken him from his cupboard, and who had shown him love.

Normally it wasn't too bad, Harry liked being crazy. Setting fire to all of the tiny broken pieces of his mind kept him warm at night.

But at this moment, he was overwhelmed.

Even the pieces of his mind occupied by a phoenix and a Veela, each of which were radiating love and concern into his being, weren't enough to break him from his dark mood.

As the large clock in the hospital wing clicked, ticked, and tocked its way past two am, Harry turned the driving force of his mind from the fear of hatred and rejection to the path of vengeance. It was a familiar path. He had spent a lot of his fourth through ninth years on this god-awful mortal coil treading it after all. With a thread of dark mirth flitting through him, he realized that most of the scars that naturally would be on his right arm and the right side of his chest had got there in the pursuit of vengeance on the cowardly gang who had terrorized the kids in his old neighborhood.

Severus Snape would pay. Hurting him, Harry could handle. He was used to pain. Hurting his people, his friends, his family, no one did that and walked away unscathed.

A grin slowly formed on Harry's otherwise unmoving face around 3:45. He had figured out what he was going to do. He had figured out a way to scar Snape just as badly as he had scarred Nym. Less visibly, perhaps, but that was about it.

They said diamonds were forever in the mundane world, which was true after a fashion, but so were crippling psychological injuries, and Harry was fairly certain he knew which Nym would prefer to be gifted with at the moment.

As the clock made its way to 3:47 Harry rose from his seat and with a final squeeze to Nym's hand, he made his way to the Sett and his stationary. Luna's cousin Lysergis would be getting a message later that day, there was a spell Harry needed to research, and most importantly of all, and he had to contact a certain clan of Swedish gnomes for another batch of their chocolate. Nym deserved to have something nice when she witnessed the breaking of the man that had brought about her injury.

* * *

><p>Nym came back to the land of the living with a start, her eyes snapping open and with a gasp her head jerked up from its place face down on the hospital bed. She remembered a lot of pain.<p>

Her memory was really fuzzy from the pain. Harry had dripped something bad on her? No, they were in potions, that was it. Clearing her mind using her fledgling grasp of occlumency, Nym tried to separate the haze of pain from the last few minutes before she had fallen asleep, or more likely given where she seemed to be laying, passed out. Thank god mum had gotten her into it since she was four.

It took her a bit, but she brought her mind back around. They had been in potions. It was the Hair-raising potion, and the rat tail-fluxweed interaction. The fungus got into her blood. Thank all the gods she and Harry had gotten into metal self transfigurations, the fungus couldn't get anything out of inorganic materials, so when she finally had been able to isolate it in her body she and Madam Pomfrey were able to actually kill the thing off.

She closed her eyes again, leaning back down into the pillow. Feeling the magic inside herself, Nym tried to find the extent of the damage.

It wasn't great.

If anyone else had been hit, they'd be crippled or dead. Injuries from magical sources, like the mushroom, were hard to cure because the magic of the offending source had to be overwhelmed by the healing magic. In a weird way she figured it compensated for how magicals were so much more resilient than their mundane brothers.

As it stood right now her whole back was covered in a thin layer of titanium. It was one of the more biologically compatible metals, and on an atomic level it was one of the smallest and simplest metals. The layer went across her entire back, covering a fair bit of her spine, and also formed a small barrier around her liver where the fungus in her blood had concentrated.

The good news was that she was stable, the bad news was that she needed Harry's help to get herself sorted. He had a lot more experience repairing atrocious amounts of trauma, and while she was better with blood chemistry and soft tissues, he knew bone structure and the nerves in the spine better. Thanks be for pain relief potions, or it would probably be a lot less fun to be her right now.

Nym went back to sleep, it was late.

* * *

><p>When she woke up again, the quiet discussion and rustling around her told her that her friends were there. The quiet presence to her right holding her hand was also a tip-off.<p>

A whisper came from the hand holding presence, "Please don't be mad at me, it wasn't my fault, I promise. I didn't mean for it to happen. I figured it out and its not my fault."

Without opening her eyes she whispered back, "Of course I don't blame you you big idiot. Accidents happen."

Her eyes popped open at the response, "This wasn't an accident though."

When her shouted "WHAT!?" attracted the focus of the rest of the friends, Harry quickly explained what he had seen and realized.

When he finished Susan and Hannah looked like they were considering murder, Hermione was confused, Neville was thoughtful, Nym was silent, and Luna clutched her wand at her side with a shaking white-knuckled fist.

"This is the important part here though. So far this hasn't been reported to Aunt Andi or mum. So we have two things we can do. We can bring this to them, and they can try to nail that greasy bat to the wall, only for Dumbledore to come in at the last moment and save him. Because lets be honest, if the headmaster protected him from the charges he faced after the war, what chance do we have for things that are all easily explained potions accidents."

The silent and murderous reactions intensified.

"OR! Or we don't report this and you let me handle it. I'll need six galleons for ingredients and international post, and I'll need Luna's help in contacting her cousin Lysergis. And in a month when I get all my things together, I preform a small ritual and Snape's tiny little mind is never quite the same."

The murder in the eyes of the people around him became thoughtful, and given what he knew of the witches around him, Harry thought the new look was more scary.

Hermione was the first to break the silence, "I don't know. We don't have the right to do this. And Professor Snape would never do something like that. He's a professor!"

"Hermione, you were there when we prepared every step of Harry's cauldron to make sure this exact thing wouldn't happen. What's more you watched Harry make the potion to protect his cauldron, a potion which I might add is a lot more complicated than the one we brewed in class. What makes more sense to you, that Harry made four serious errors in a row that were each incredibly dangerous, or that the man that has hated Harry since the moment he found out Harry's last name, who changed his entire class behavior after the same, and who had motive, opportunity, and the ability to do what Harry described did a series of actions entirely in line with his reputation and apparent character?" Susan asked.

Hannah two cents were, "Just think about it."

Nym was still face down on the hospital bed, "No. We're going Harry's route. I've borrowed some of his books, for a pureblood death eater idiot like him, this will be justice."

Harry smiled.

* * *

><p>In the days that followed, the event most of the underage population of the British Isles spent their time obsessing over was the premier quidditch match of the year. Gryffindor versus Slytherin. Quidditch fever was striking the castle, and if it was a recognized illness (it wasn't, despite Fred and George Weasley's best efforts in lobbying the board of directors of St. Mungos every six months since the age of five) there wouldn't be a butt in a single class seat.<p>

On the topic of quidditch the Hufflepuff team was in its usual form, which is a very polite way of saying it wasn't really going anywhere. Their seeker, a lad by the name Diggory, was a great guy (big hit among the first years he helped tutor in transfiguration) and was a sight better than his competition. Sadly his skill didn't on its own deny that of the new Gryffindor chaser line, or the traditional Slytherin brutality (and their new brooms this year, which had a lot of the school up in arms). The badgers did usually break even with the ravens though.

This year was the first that any of the friends could possibly try out for the house team, but none had made the effort. Hermione was simply too bookish for any kind of sport to really interest her, Luna claimed, "The nargles (_bunch of sheep-shaggers_) told me it wouldn't end well if I tried. Also I wouldn't make it," and the rest of the friends had seen memories in the Quidditch hall of fame of the 413th world Cup, in which both teams had been disqualified when poor beater control resulted in no less that 5 fractured collar bones, seven brain altering concussions, a dozen permanent leg injuries, and an even two score broken hand and finger bones. It was bloody, Susan got the surreal experience of vomiting inside a memory, and they each privately and separately swore off of any foolish notions of joining a house team.

The closer they all got to the big day, the more tense it got in the castle. The lions and snakes weren't a friendly bunch on the best of days, and the days weren't really moving in a positive direction. In the two days before the match Alicia Spinnet, a Gryff' chaser, gained a tail (she would later claim it improved her balance and lobbied hard to be permitted to play with the alteration), and Malfoy, who had bought his way into the seeker spot, was cursed so many times that he was seen at one point to have teeth growing where his eyebrows definitely should have been. The twins were briefly transfigured into matching West Australian quokka, which they claimed was 'wicked' and swore to replicate in a more animagus way. Marcus Flint, Slytherin chaser and team captain, was found transformed into a particularly vile two-stone banana slug (probably in retaliation) not twenty minutes before the match was to start and had to go through emergency treatment by Madam Pomfrey before he was allowed to play.

Harry honestly wondered why they allowed the game to be played in the first place, given the amount of carnage that took place before the balls were even released for play. He would later look on those feelings as prophetic, and consider double checking whether or not his family tree concealed any seer's blood.

* * *

><p>In a strict adherence to tradition, nearly the entire population of the school filed outside to the quidditch pitch and ascended to the lofty heights from which they would enjoy the season's first match of their favorite blood sport.<p>

Harry and the vast majority of Hufflepuff house had chosen to support the red and gold for this match. The decision having been based almost entirely on the amount of annoyance the house as a whole felt from Draco Malfoy alone.

As the players flew out onto the field, Harry automatically began tuning out the guy calling the match (some joker by the name Jordan) in favor of the commentary provided by Luna who took the seats to his immediate left. Nym sat close to him on his right.

She had (Of course you big idiot! as she had put it) forgiven him the instant she had regained consciousness enough to talk to him. Harry helped her down the nutrition potion she needed for the raw material to fix her up, and he talked her through the more complex nerve concentrations around her spine which had been messed up by the fungus.

She had been out of the hospital without the matron of the ward's permission the very next day, and upon her recapture and the completion of thirteen different scans, she was released formally by dinner.

Everyone, barring Hermione who quietly insisted no professor would ever do such a thing, accepted and understood Harry's logic. The fact that the reaction they had prepared against happened at all was enough for them to agree that a switching spell had taken place. They had no outstanding rivalries or grudges with the ravens, so Snape was really the only one left with ability motive, and opportunity, as Susan was quick to point out.

So they all sat in a bunch in the Hufflepuff section, each wearing hastily transfigured Gryffindor gear, patiently waiting for the whistle to blow and the balls to be released.

When the whistle blew and the balls were released the lions took immediate possession of the quaffle and began a run at the Slytherin goal posts. Draco Malfoy and Cormac McLaggen both made for a high orbit of the field, each clearly intending to merely mark the other and wait for them to spot the snitch, heralding a game that would be both long and grueling.

The bludgers took flight, and under the arms and clubs of the Weasley twins and a pair of hulking green robed guys who looked like visions of Crabbe and Goyle's futures, began flying around the pitch and disrupting chaser movement. The game was on in its own full glory, the Gryffindor chasers scoring a few quick goals, everything starting on just as the audience expected.

Right up until a house elf popped in between Harry and Nym, anxiously wringing its ears and looking guilty.

While everyone else jumped at the sound and sudden translocation of an elf, Harry calmly looked over at the elf and in a voice that was filled with preemptive regret said, "Dobby, right?"

The elf nodded furiously.

"You being here means trouble. I'm not going to like this am I?"

The elf shook its head, long elven ears slapping its cheeks with the vigor of the movement.

"Crap. This is quidditch, so it's the bludgers, isn't it? What else could hurt me here? You probably heard someone say I was stubborn and planned ahead in case I still came back," Harry closed his eyes, sighing, "You replaced one with a professional model? Made it track me probably, and if you're here now that means you couldn't reverse it."

The elf looked incredibly embarrassed, "N-not one, Harry."

"You lost control of them, didn't you?"

Another nod.

"This is going to really hurt, isn't it?"

The elf, Dobby, held out a long fingered hand and wiggled it as if to say 'maybe'.

"Fuck."

Confused whispers had been filling the seats around the pitch as the two spoke and confused the hell out of the people around them. The bludgers had both exhibited a strong preference for the direction of the Hufflepuff section, each going as far as changing directions after being hit after only a few meters and heading back towards Badger territory and one Harry Potter. Thus far the beaters had held their own against the flying cannon balls, but as Harry used words his mum wouldn't have approved of, one broke through the hardened bat wielded by Fred (or was it George? the two were impossible to tell apart) Weasley.

The bludger was a professional model, meaning it was exactly 27.2 kilograms of enchanted iron with a top speed of one hundred fifteen kilometers per hour and an average acceleration that allowed it to get to that speed from a dead start in just under three seconds. Its enchantments had been augmented by a house elf of questionable sanity, which was really saying something considering house elves as a race weren't known for their mental stability. The changes made to an object already enchanted to be aggressive and somewhat temperamental resulted in a flying iron ball best described by the phrase 'possessed by the devil'.

Gasps filled the stadium as the bludger made its ire known, and the stadium was treated to a sight never before seen.

Harry sprang from his seat and with a (artificially) long legged stride tried to make his way to an aisle as the Weasley defying bludger made its first attack run. Two steps carried him a meter and a half from his position next to Luna and Nym, putting him directly over a first year badger named William. Harry saw in a moment that he wouldn't be able to go any farther before the bludger impacted on his weak and fragile meat shell, so he did what he could to change those adjectives.

Hooking his left foot under the bench seat between Will's legs, Harry placed his right foot firmly on the next bench down and made some serious body modifications. Using Nym's stomach punch from earlier in the year as a source of inspiration, Harry poured power into his body and transfigured the bones in his lower body into tungsten, joining them at the joints and forming a strong metal base for his hastily made plan. Without regard for how much it was going to hurt, Harry made a fist with his right hand and with another power intensive bit of internal transfiguration, made his entire forearm a single solid chunk of the same metal.

The bludger was now only a few meters away when he finished, so Harry wound up, and with a clang that could be heard clearly from inside Hagrid's hut, punched the bludger full on.

The hardened Iron had nothing on a fist nearly twice as strong, and with the speed it hit Harry, his shoulder dislocated with a sickening pop and the bludger deformed over his fist in a terrifying approximation of a boxer's glove.

Harry nearly blacked out from the pain, not only from the hit but from the nerve endings all around his body rejecting the idea that they suddenly ended in a piece of metal. His lower body being rigid kept him up, and after shaking himself out of the pain, he unbound his joints, re-racked his shoulder, and kept moving.

With his every step clanking, and a metal fist that was sluggishly attempting to hit him, Harry made it to the stairwell going down to the field just as the second bludger escaped the coordinated efforts of the three remaining effective beaters in the air. Harry vaulted five vertical meters of stairs, crashing onto the landing with another unholy thump.

The bludger chose a vertical approach, slamming through the hardened wood that made up and supported the stands. Harry met its slowed approach with his iron gloved tungsten hand, and another clang sounded throughout the pitch. The flying cannon ball bounced off his fist and embedded into the support beam next to him. As it struggled to free itself from the enchanted wood around itself, Harry took the opportunity to move himself down another five levels of the staircase.

Now only four stories of air were between him and open ground, which he desperately needed. Not only to get the death ball away from people, but also to get it away from the beams supporting the stands that currently held around a quarter of the school.

As the bludger broke from its oak confines twenty five meters above him, Harry took a long walk off a short block and jumped off the staircase.

The entire stadium had been following his progress, awestruck, since the first bludger had broken through George Weasley's bat. There wasn't a sound other than the second year's herculean effort to not be killed and spare his audience a similar fate. The only people to react as anything but dumbstruck observers, namely Pomona Sprout and the friends Harry had sprinted away from, couldn't do anything but watch with their wands at the ready. Any spell they cast was more likely to break a support or hit the boy himself than do any good.

The spell on everyone broke as soon as he hit open air though. Gasps once again reigned supreme, though seven wands did flash out with identical cries of _arresto momentum_!

As Harry met open air he felt it was time to do a bit of good news/bad news before he hit the ground.

Good news:

-People are trying to help, finally

-Gasps mean maybe more than just my friends are doing so

-Now that I'm out here the bludger can't bring down the seating

-I've survived a four storey fall before without injury

Bad news:

-I wasn't composed of mostly metal at the time

-This metal is going to fuck my body chemistry completely until I can get it fixed

-My tendons and muscles probably aren't too happy with me either

-I still have a cannon ball coming after me

-I'm now in the open where it can actually get up to speed

-My shoulder is still sorta dislocated

-Where the bloody hell is Hedwig?

Good News:

-_arresto momentum_ is my friend!

Bad news:

-Son of a bitch, that bludger is going a lot faster than me now

-This is going to hurt

With a huge burst of wood chunks and high speed splinters, the remaining bludger crashed through the last barrier separating it from Harry. With seven separate momentum cancelling charms of various strengths on him, Harry was falling at a speed just under a fast walk. With only open air around it, the bludger began moving just a _hair_ faster.

The two bodies met ten meters above the ground with another great CLANG, Harry again using his doubly metal fist to try and ward off a blow from a seriously cheesed off flying metal sphere. The crash accelerated Harry's last seven or so meters, and drove both bodies directly into the dirt.

Despite the damage, Harry was soon on his feet and the bludger was moving away to add a little distance to the space it had to accelerate. Harry, after all, had a reputation to maintain. The bludger just really wanted Harry.

At this point, the scene went from awesome (if you were an audience member) or tragic (if you were Harry or someone who liked him) to surreal.

Harry began running in great clanking circles, ducking, dodging, and weaving in an effort to not be made into a human/metal hybrid form of jam, Dobby began running after him in an effort to help, and the bludger kept plugging along like a good little chunk of murderous flying metal.

Harry's shouts of "Jesus Christ!", "Merlin help me!", and "By Odin's musty balls, not the face!" began to draw small bouts of manic laughter.

Dobby's shrill elven voice chiming in with, "Stop Harry! I's can help!", "Please stop mean bludger!", and "I's only trying to help!" did not, in point of fact, help.

The elf began snapping his fingers, casting great waves of blue colored elven magic at the bludger when it closed with Harry, only for eight out of every ten spells to impact on Harry and make the poor kid stumble.

Despite the fact that the pureblood students didn't have the experience to draw comparisons to Bugs and Daffy or Tom and Jerry like the first born or half blood students did, laughter still made it's presence known at the edges of the crowd. This was clearly a bad thing, Harry's pain was real, but it was honestly hard not to laugh at the insanity. Even Harry would one day laugh at the event, admittedly at the age of twenty four while drunk, but it would one day happen.

The show went on for three full minutes before Sprout was able to clip the bludger with a very well placed _reducto_, thankfully with the sense to do so after it had passed by Harry, leaving the high speed chunks of what used to be a bludger flying through the air towards empty ground.

As Harry finally collapsed to the ground of both grievous personal injury and complete exhaustion, the whole staff section finally moved into action. Lockhart was one of the first to Harry's side, taking a place next to Nym and Hannah who both had been making their way down since the second minute of Harry's flight from iron.

Harry lay on the ground, bones of metal, fist both of metal and covered in metal, dislocated shoulder, severely strained tendons and joints, and only a few shredded muscles. For a metamorph they were really only flesh wounds, a fact which Lockhart was sadly only dimly aware of.

As Nym scrambled to cradle Harry's head so she could try and talk him through reversing the changes he made, Hannah was casting low level diagnostics to figure out how bad it was. Lockhart went with opening his mouth.

"I know you're a metamorphmagus, Harry my dear boy! Not to worry, I'm sure you'll be fine in a jiffy. Biggest problem for you is the bit of bludger you got on your fist there, eh?" the man said, clapping Harry on the dislocated shoulder.

When the only response he got was a moan of pain and a scrunching of Harry's face, he took his help a step farther, "I know just the spell to help you! Learned it from a Sherpa when I was tracking a runespoor over Mount Kilimanjaro, it'll get that iron right off of you. _Omneferrum liquesco_!"

At his word and flick, Harry's entire right arm began heating up rapidly, and in a manner of seconds it was white hot. In under twenty seconds total, his arm from the elbow down liquefied and melted into the ground beneath him. The heat of the action immediately cauterizing the stump he now had just above the joint.

The pain of having an arm literally melted away brought Harry's mind out of wherever it had been hiding and back almost all the way to coherence, "You melted my arm. My arm," he said, his voice sounding only a little dazed.

Harry looked up from the stump to make eye contact with the wizard in the lurid yellow robes, "That was my right arm you jerk! I liked that arm! It was my favorite arm!"

He looked back down at his stump, "That was my first ever right arm. I _really_ liked that arm."

Harry followed his statement by finally passing out.


	21. Chapter 20: Title pending

Chapter 20

Reality snuck up on him as he enjoyed his time in quiet darkness. One moment he was comfortable and floating, the next he felt every moment of his last few memories all at once. He gritted his teeth, but in the end he couldn't help it.

"Ow ow ow ow ow goddamnsonofagoatbuggeringwhore that stings!"

Harry inhaled sharply between his teeth, and knowing that the day could only go up from here, he opened his eyes to see where he landed.

At the foot of his bed Madam Pomfrey held what looked like a clipboard and was conversing apparently silently with Nym and Hannah. Harry heaved himself up into a sitting position and gave a great stretch as he scooted back so he could rest his back on the head board.

As he sat back, he moved his stump of an arm forward and took a good look at it. At his stump. God damn, Lockhart just got severely bumped up on Harry list of people who were going to get beat up. He had already killed one defense professor. He might as well try and go two for two. The man had cost him an arm! He really liked that arm!

With a sigh, Harry closed his eyes and concentrated for a moment. Hinge joint joining the humorous to the radius and ulna. Flexion muscles, extension muscles, ligaments and connective tissue, brachial artery, and nerves going further down. Wrist, oooh, that one was a bit more complicated, eight bones making up the base for the five metacarpals that become the fingers and the whole bit being chock full of ligaments. Then the fingers, phalanges if you feel like being a pretentious doctor person. Gods above, the nerve endings and blood vessels too.

Harry spent half an hour entirely out of contact with the outside world, just visualizing every aspect of his stupid bloody missing arm. Intuition and his normal hyper-awareness of his body filled in the blanks that his memory developed in the time between his injury and when he had last studied the arm in his old anatomy textbook.

When he opened his eyes again, he couldn't help but feel relieved. Sure, he had just regrown a full limb, and yes he now had confirmation he could (which was a serious load off of his mind, he had wanted to know for ages, but cutting off a limb for curiosity was beyond even his crazy), but the real reason he felt relieved was the fact that the damned stinging on the stump was gone now. Whether it was oncoming phantom limb syndrome, or the fact that there were surely pieces of partially stabilized tungsten in the thoroughly cauterized wound, the stinging had been really getting to him.

Harry lifted his arm in front of himself, examining every aspect of the limb in front of him. Gently he brought it to his face and gave his arm a kiss, "Right arm, don't ever leave me again. I need you, to like touch stuff and stuff."

Abruptly laughter came from his left, making him jump.

"You know, all of the worry and concern my job brings to me is worth it in these sweet moments, seeing a boy reunited with a limb."

Harry frowned. Who knew Madam Pomfrey was a snarky git? The laughter from his friends who had surrounded his bed told him they certainly hadn't.

"Where is that blonde idiot? If my magic hadn't isolated me he could have cooked me alive with that spell! I think I need to keep my record up this year."

Susan clearly saw that her friend and brother was only slightly joking. Only very slightly. She was actually a little afraid of the glint in his eye, "Woah, woah, woah, let's not go to murder just yet, bub. How about we just call mum and let her deal with this. I mean there isn't a criminal case, Lockhart just used a spell wrong on a metamorph, admittedly someone who is incredibly complicated from a medical standpoint."

"You have no idea!" was shouted from Pomfrey's position in the potion closet.

"I dunno," Harry said, "I want to say he requires a Snape level response, but honestly I think this is proof of what we had been suspecting, that Lockhart is a fraud and an idiot, rather than an attack on me. Well the arm thing wasn't an attack... Oh Ra's ancient bollocks... Dobby?"

In an instant the same elf that the friends saw plague Harry at the match re-appeared at his side. Nym audible growled and made a move for the diminutive creature's throat, but Harry waved her off at the last moment. The elf was curious mix of guilty and defiant, like he felt his guilt, but was daring the young metamorph on. It wasn't hard for Harry to figure that out, he had been there, and Dobby was a deeply abused elf.

"Dobby, listen, I'm not mad at you. I'm a bit mad at Lockhart, and maybe Dumbledore for hiring him, but I know that you were just trying to help me, even if you went a bit overboard," Harry hefted his arm, "Look, I've even got my limb back, so it's okay. I wanted you to know I don't blame you, okay?"

The elf gave Harry a curious glance, "So I do not have to put my hands in the ovens?"

"No buddy. Don't worry about me, just try to let me know if you put anything else into place to try and get me out of here, okay?"

"I wills go and remove teeths from the third floor toilets then. And thank yous Harry."

As everyone exchanged glances in terrified wonder over what exactly toilet teeth were, and more importantly, what they did, Harry had another thought, "Hedwig! Where is that blasted bird? She could've flashed me out of there!"

As if summoned by her injured friend, the bird appeared in a blast of fire above the bed, and with a decided apologetic trill took up a place on the head board beside Harry.

"Well, where were you, I needed you!"

The phoenix crooked its head down to look harry in the eye and sang a few notes in a dismissive tone.

"What do you mean I was fine!? I mean yeah, I re-grew the arm, but come on!"

Bringing her head back up and looking loftily off in the air she chirped once.

"Phoenix business! Phoenix business my ass! What is it, you and half a dozen others, perched on pillars of light, debating moral philosophy and how best to guide the rest of the sentients to a happier life?"

Her chirp was a definitive no.

"Well what then? You and six or seven others around a poker table with cigars and fire whisky?"

Hedwig was curiously silent.

"Wait a minute, is that where you are all the time?"

More silence.

"I can't believe this!" Harry said looking back to his open mouthed friends, "My familiar is a drunken gambler!"

Hedwig flopped gracelessly down to Harry's lap, and buried her head into his chest, crooning sorrowfully. Harry began stroking her feathers.

"No, no, no, it's okay girl. I'm not judging you. I may think it's weird that you're not even two years old and you're off drinking, but its okay. I know you can't be with me all the time."

Hedwig's head peaked up at him.

"Just cut down on the drinking and we'll be okay, yeah?"

The phoenix emitted a few soft notes of a happy song, and settled closer into his chest.

"Did you at least win?"

Hedwig extended her long neck and looked Harry straight in the eyes with what could only be a smug expression.

"That's my girl," Harry said proudly.

Hedwig folded her head under a wing and Harry began stroking her feathers, after a moment he looked back up to his friends and the now utterly confused medi-witch.

"What?"

* * *

><p>Hedwig left his side at noon, and the friends all stayed until shortly before dinner. His avian friend promised to cool it on the fire whisky (Harry was nervous that she seemed a little specific on that count), Luna informed the bird that the wrackspurts in her feathers would tell them either way, and everyone else left to eat and add a new entry to their 'Harry Potter: What the fuck?' journals.<p>

Harry wanted out as soon as his company left, the antiseptic smell of the hospital reminded him of his life before his mum and sister. It put him on edge. But the commandant of the hospital wing refused to let him even leave the bed he was in.

Harry spent half an hour considering how he could escape, including several methods involving creative interactions between the potter blade and the hinges on heavy wooden door to the ward. When he ran out of ideas, he sat back, and realized that maybe the head witch in charge may have a point.

He did just lose and regrow an arm, destroy and regrow nearly all the connective tissue in his lower body, shred a number of muscles, flood his blood stream with traces of tungsten, bruise all of the ribs on his left side from a four story impact, and finally get a significant amount of general spell damage from a certain elf's misaimed magic.

Maybe he should spend a night under a healer's care.

Harry had wonder how he kept getting into these things. In his defense though, this one was entirely the elf's fault.

Falling into a light doze, Harry passed the time until the daylight hours and his return to an arguably more normal day at Hogwarts. He had spent all day in bed having nutrient potions and healing draughts pumped through him, so he wasn't able to actually sleep. When Dumbledore and McGonagall opened the creaking doors to the hospital wing (Harry absently noted that he should remind Griffy and his friends in the kitchen to oil the hinges) floating a tiny body behind them, he was awake in an instant.

Harry discovered that feigning unconsciousness was a lot like riding a bike, inasmuch as he was capable of doing it but if you watched him closely you would soon realize he hadn't used the skill in several months. Thankfully the headmaster and deputy headmistress chose the bed across from him, directing their attention away.

"This makes two, Albus."

The headmaster leaned over the body, apparently staring into the open eyes of whatever it was, "I do not recognize him. And I know nearly every elf we employ."

Harry had to suppress a dismayed gasp.

"Filtch found him on the stairs two levels down, frozen with a heavily tarnished silver tray in his hands. There was treacle tart everywhere, so we think he was coming up here for Mr. Bones. Though why an unknown elf would be here for that..."

Both of the senior staff members sat back onto stools next to the bed, staring at the body. McGonagall started again.

"Albus, what does this mean? Two of them. It can't be, can it?"

"My dear Minerva, I fear it is so. I fear the chamber of secrets has yet again been opened."

The woman gasped, "Then we must call the parents, we must have everyone removed! We'll have to call in the curse breakers, if the chamber is open... We cannot allow anyone else to join poor Myrtle."

The headmaster leaned toward his subordinate over the bed and said with a hint of steel in his voice, "We cannot. If the heir is active, if this is all happening again now, it means one of our students is the cause. If we do as you say, not only will they close this place of learning down forever, but we'll be letting whatever is causing this loose out into the wider world. For now these things are confined here, to these halls. Should this be more widely known, we could see attacks happening all across Scotland."

Minerva seemed to shrink into herself with every word, "But what can we do?"

"We keep our eyes open and our ears to the ground. We have myself, Fillius, you, and Lockhart here. If we catch even the slightest scent of the cause we can rain fire down on it. Until then, business as usual."

Harry knew he wasn't sleeping then. The worst part about it all was that the headmaster was right. The last time there was a threat, Hogwarts itself had connected to Harry to get aid. This certainly qualified, so where was the sentient castle? Harry needed to get in contact and see. He also needed to tell everyone why writing home about this was a bad idea, and he needed to see Griffy.

Suddenly the thought of breaking out of the ward seemed like a much better idea.

* * *

><p>Harry got out of the medical prison the next morning after breakfast, and it being Sunday, he immediately went to take care of business. The discovery that Dobby had been bringing him his favorite dessert as a kind of peace offering when he was petrified weighing heavily on his mind.<p>

First stop was the kitchens. The house elves went around the entire castle, doing all of the cleaning, laundry, and general maintenance, but if you wanted to find an elf, the kitchen was always the best bet. Elves as a whole were hungry little critters, and while they didn't eat much in one go, they did eat almost constantly.

Harry joined in on the post breakfast dishes, and when they were done he caught a few minutes with Griffy to let him know an elf had been injured. It may not have been a Hogwarts elf, but if it happened to one it could happen to any of them. The ancient elf was thankful for the warning.

Harry's next step was to touch base with the friends. They took step two because Harry really _really _was not looking forward to step three. Attempting communication with a castle. It was one of the basic safety things taught to kids in the magical world, if you don't know where the brain is, don't talk to it. And now he was going to deliberately talk to a millennia old castle, whose dungeons, broom closets, stair wells, and classrooms had all probably seen so many unholy acts it would give old Voldy himself pause.

It was going to be a long day.

Harry headed to the library, figuring that as a Sunday and with essays in charms, potions (at the thought of potions he cackled madly internally, ole' cousin Lysergis had been very receptive to the cause), and transfiguration due the next week, Hermione would have made a cattle drive for their usual table back behind the section on theoretical NEWT level herbology.

As Harry crossed the moving staircase that usually led from the right hand side of the second floor to the left of the third, he crossed what was probably his real target. Luna was sitting on the miniature landing of the stair set, hugging one of the columns that supported the bannister and dangling her legs off the side. Her normal rainbow colored chuck taylors lay at her side, and she was humming a short lullaby to either herself or the stairs.

As soon as Harry made contact, the stairs began transitioning to the opposite orientation (left hand second floor to right hand third), a laborious process that usually took around twenty minutes. It was just another oddity in the castle, like the trick loo on the fifth floor that was a single toilet in the middle of a room full of mirrors, or the second floor slide behind the portrait of a grumpy wart-ridden witch doing her taxes.

As soon as it started, the pair was essentially isolated, so Harry decided to make the most of it and sprawled along the stairs just below his waif-ish blonde friend.

"Little girl blue, come blow your horn,

The nargles in the mistletoe, the humdinger pie's getting warm,

Where is the lady who takes care of the floating sheep?

She's out in the moonlight, fast asleep."

Harry watched her face as she recited the lyrics, it wasn't a version he was familiar with, but he'd have to be blind to miss the wetness collecting at the corners of her closed eyes as she recited.

It felt right to whisper, "That was your mother's, wasn't it?"

"She used to put me to sleep in my room with it. My bed under the huge window facing east. She would leave me in the moonlight each night. Her beautiful little moon, she said."

Harry sat up against the banister and put his hand on hers, even at this age his hand covered hers entirely, "I'm here, we're here for you."

Luna sniffed a bit and ran a hand across her eyes, "I know. I just needed to give Dobby a good night wish. He's a cheeky little bastard, but he meant well."

"I had no idea you knew him," Harry said with a little surprise.

"It was hard not to. He was so full of life. He really likes you, you know that? Most elves do for who you are, but a big part of why they accept you so readily is how much it got better for elves after that Halloween."

Harry's surprise didn't stop, "I had no idea. It was just nice to find brothers in arms. I didn't question it, and they never said anything."

"Well they hardly would say that to your face, would they?" she said with a smile.

"Point."

"You don't have a monopoly on elvin relations, buck-o."

"I don't know why I'm surprised you know that whatever it was got Dobby. You always seem to know."

Luna smiled sadly, "The Lovegoods are blessed with the knowledge to unlock the sight. It's the basis for your plan for Snape, you know."

With widening eyes Harry quickly snapped, "How do you know what I was gonna-"

"I just know," She interjected with a smile, "Though your contacting my cousin was a big tip off."

Harry pretend grumbled and Luna gave him a quick smack in the arm. There was still a solid ten minutes at least until the stairs finished their switch up. The good news was that the stairs now led directly to the library. Harry kept his hand on hers, and when the stairs finally stopped moving he gave the small girl a hand up, and with her carrying her shoes alongside, the pair entered the library to spread the bad news.

Hermione moved further into research mode, something was petrifying things and she aimed to find out what. True to form, Neville hit a few of the books near them to try and find a way to grow mandragora root faster. The strange and creepy roots that took the form of a tiny grubby person were the base of the class of healing draughts that might restore Mrs. Norris and Dobby. Hannah assisted him, while Susan and Nym doubled down on their DADA work. If it was a critter causing this, or some student slinging high-level petrifaction spells, they'd be ready.

They all knew about 'kill-rip-tear', Harry had shared what he heard after all. The going theory was a person, though they weren't ruling out one of the more intelligent magical species, given that Harry had heard the voice moving through walls.

While they were all working on their different responses to Dobby being injured, Harry sat down and began his attempt to contact the castle.

Back when he killed some kind of Quirinus Quirrell/Voldemort combination, the castle had somehow lowered the barriers around his mind provided by the Gryffindor and Hufflepuff rings. Harry's first plan was to try and push magic through the ring and think loudly about Hogwarts. It was exactly the kind of hair brained plan that usually served him well.

Harry left his seat at the table, giving his space up to Nym and Susan who were spreading out references, and took a spot on the floor with his back against a nearby wall. Crossing his legs, he closed his eyes and tried to focus his magic. This would be exactly the kind of exercise that occlumency would improve, but given that he had almost no natural talent for it and he relied n his beloved bird for mental protection, that route was closed.

Instead, Harry focused on his rings like he had focused on re-assembling his arm the day before. He pictured them in his mind, every detail, the slight imperfection in the ruby of the Gryffindor ring underneath one of the two griffins rampant across its top. The Hufflepuff ring had a small honey comb overlaying the citrine at its center, and there was a small hexagonal scratch in the jewel next to it. The Gryffindor ring had a small scratch on the inside near the top, the Hufflepuff ring was made of gold but had a small and curious darkened area in a stripe towards the bottom.

His pushed his awareness towards the rings like he did with his arm, and he usually did when he scanned his body, thankfully he had a bit of experience from Hedwig and Gabby with mental communication.

"_Hogwarts? Are you there? Can you hear me? Calling all sentient ancient castles!_"

Harry felt foolish.

"_There's something in the castle now that is petrifying people. I don't know what it is, but if you called me to action before I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess that you might need me again._"

If he didn't have control over his biological reactions he might have been blushing from embarrassment. It felt dumb mentally calling out to a massive inanimate object. If his friends didn't already think he was crazy, he might be worried about what they thought of him.

"_Come on, throw a kid a bone, yeah?_"

Harry sighed and relaxed against the wall. He knew it was going to be a long day. The only other plan he had was to go through Rowena's books again and try to find out if her room could be manipulated into a communication channel. If THAT failed his next idea was to track down the ward room, which was something that wasn't covered in any of the founder's journals he had. If he could find it (unlikely) he could try and meditate inside it and connect to the castle that way? If all of that failed then he figured he would just start taking shots at the walls with low power blasting curses and see if the stupid school took notice of him then, and-

"_CHILD! WOW. DAMN. CALM YOUR ORGAN SACK DOWN._"

"_Organ sack?_"

"_YES, YOUR TINY WEAK AND MEAT FILLED FORM. CALM IT DOWN. YOU'RE THE FIRST CREATOR'S HEIR HERE IN MANY YEARS, I AM NOT USED TO COMMUNICATION._"

"_Okay then, umm, can you be quieter? It feels like I'm getting screamed at inside my head._"

"_IT IS DIFFICULT TO CONTROL THE VOLUME OF MY VOICE. I WILL TRY... __**IS THIS ANY BETTER?**_"

Harry's head felt like one of his friends from the kitchen ran an egg beater through his brain.

"_NO! By Buddha's bloated belly! Do you not have an 'inside' voice!?_"

"_BY DEFINITION ANY VOICE I USE IS 'INSIDE' AS YOU SAY. SILLY CHILD_," the castle said, chuckling.

Harry wanted to smack himself for setting that one up.

"_Damit Hogwarts! This is serious! Something has gone and petrified a house elf, a sort-of friend, Dobby. Someone or something is on the loose here, and I'm pretty sure it's out to hurt us! On Halloween this year I heard a voice talking that said it was told to kill, and it led me to the cat Mrs. Norris. Do you know anything about that?"_

"_CHILD, I AM NOT AWARE OF ANY SUCH THREAT. I FELT AN ELF BE INJURED, BUT I DID NOT SENSE ANY FOUL MAGIC. THE CLOSEST MAGIC I SENSED TO WHERE THE ELF DOBBY WAS FOUND WAS A CONTRACEPTIVE CHARM USED IN THE BROOM CLOSET ONE FLOOR DOWN FROM THE SPOT. IT WAS ONE OF MY HUFFLEPUFFS AND ONE OF MY RAVENCLAWS, ELRIC KELMSWO-"_

"_Lets just stop you there. I'm sure they appreciate their own privacy. But you didn't feel anything?"_

"_LAST NIGHT I FELT TWELVE CONTRACEPTIVE CHARMS, FIFTEEN LEVITATIONS, ONE MINOR BINDING SPELL, FIVE WARMING CHARMS, HALF A DOZEN PILLOW CONJURATIONS, AND A SINGLE SLEEP INDUCING CHARM. THERE WAS NO OFFENSIVE MAGIC USED, BECAUSE THE BINDING WAS CONSENSUAL BETWEEN TWO SLYTHERINS IN THE UPPER CLASS POTIONS INGREDIENT STORAGE ROOM, USED TO BIND THE LADY'S ANKLES TO THE LEGS OF THE PREPARATION TABLE SO THE MALE COULD-"_

"_NO! No no no! I do not want to know what Slytherins get up to when left alone after hours, you massive perverted castle. I do not want to know. Can you alert me to any offensive magic being used? I don't trust the headmaster, especially after last year..."_

"_I WILL DO ASK YOU ASK, CREATOR'S CHILD. I WILL BE VIGILANT."_

"_Thank you, Hogwarts."_

"_NOW, DID YOU KNOW THAT IN THEIR SEVENTH YEAR YOUR PARENTS WERE RESPONSIBLE FOR DEFILING NO LESS THAN SEVENTEE-"_

"_NO! Gods damn!"_

Harry snapped his awareness away from the terrible scarring words, and attempted to shut the castle out. He stood from his place at the wall and resumed his spot at the table. When he cleared a bit of space from between Nym's references, she looked up at him, and couldn't help but ask.

"Harry, you look like you just watched Weasley eating."

Harry looked up from his hands and met his metamorph friend's eyes straight on, "This castle is a massive sleazy git."

* * *

><p>When classes resumed the friends all got back to their semi-normal schedules. The focus in their private time was more defense oriented than normal, given the second petrification. Susan was fond of quoting Ian Fleming, "Once was an accident, twice was a coincidence, and three times was enemy action," in this case the friends were willing to begin preparation at two.<p>

Ron Weasley broke the peace first, by coming a hair's breadth away from expulsion.

He, and his friends Thomas and Finnegan, evidently brought a package of Dr. Filibuster's Fabulous Wet-start, No-Heat fireworks into the Slytherin/Gryffindor potions class. Word along the grapevine was that they had been trying to make a distraction so they could nick something from Snape's private ingredient stores, but instead they bollocksed their plan up to disastrous effect.

From what the other second year lions were saying, Weasley took a single firecracker from the package, and made to toss it into Malfoy's cauldron, but in a style the school had come to associate with the second youngest Weasley, he missed the blond menace's cauldron entirely and managed to bounce it off a ceiling beam into Finnegan's next to him.

The swelling solution he was making (he was evidently _still_ on that lesson) exploded across the class, and after the three inhaled portions of it, they all nearly died. That was bad on its own. Then the potion from inside his cauldron hit the package of fireworks they had drawn from, and there was bedlam.

No one could figure out why Weasley could need ingredients from Snape's stores, but it all made for excellent gossip.

Of all people Lockhart made the next weirdness happen at Hogwarts. Harry in particular was disappointed, as he wanted to be the cause of the next disruption tied to Lockhart's name.

Wednesday posters went up in all of the common rooms announcing a dueling club to be started that Friday. There was massive rumor mongering from then until the day of the meeting as Harry, Susan, Hannah, and Nym weren't the only ones to have seen Flitwick's dueling exploits in the hall of fame. On top of which, Snape's dark arts skills were well known, and to the satisfaction of most of the general public, Lockhart was around as well.

In general it made for an exciting atmosphere in the run up to the Friday after dinner timeslot of the club. The students were all called to leave the great hall, and as they exited the doors to the hall closed behind them, the hall left apparently empty.

Harry felt a distinct amusement from a direction he identified as Hogwarts (for a brief moment, he again considered what rent should be for occupying a piece of his mental real estate) as the doors opened again.

The Great Hall stood empty save for a waist high dueling platform four meters wide and twenty long. It felt wrong for a moment, the lack of the massive tables that held the student for each meal. They were unused to seeing the hall so empty, all were long familiar with the paving stones that made up the floor, but to see them so clearly across the too empty room made the familiar seem alien. The sky shown on the roof above the hall was clear, and the view of the stars was unhindered by any cloud, nebulae were visible to the naked eye on the charmed roof. At the platform's middle, in a horrifyingly purple robe, stood none other than Gilderoy Lockhart. Behind him, in what could only be called a skulk, stood the dark form of Hogwartss potions master.

Hushed whispers ran rife through the crowds as they re-entered the hall. Many had put their money on Snape and Flitwick, or Flitwick and Lockhart, or any of the three alone. The odds on the dueling club being proctored by the professor with terrible fashion sense and the professor with no fashion sense had been long indeed.

"Welcome everyone!"

Lockhart's word rang out into the gently murmuring hall as he opened his arms to the student still entering the great hall.

"Welcome to the first meeting of the Hogwarts Dueling Club to be held in well over five decades!"

Hermione's face screwed into an expression of consternation and disapproval as she whispered to the friends around her, "It's been thirty-four years, the last dueling club meeting was held in 1958 when the club was cancelled because an out of control duel between two fifth years resulted in a first year Hufflepuff being fused into the wall of a hallway on the second floor."

The friends grimaced at the thought of how difficult that would have been to reverse as the puffed up man in purple continued on the dueling platform, "You all know well my own dueling accomplishments and exploits, for any questions please see my published works," with a smile that Harry personally felt could peel paint, Lockhart managed to smarm out, "You should all have a copy for your Defense Against the Dark Arts lessons."

"My assistant today is none other than your very own potions master, though none of you should fret, he'll still be able to mix his little brews when I'm done with him. We're going to perform a small duel in front of you all as a demonstration, and then we'll have each of you up here in turn to find each of your relative skill levels. I anticipate that we'll manage to get through a large number of you all, and we'll be going in no particular order."

Harry and all of his friends honestly didn't know where to begin with what they had just heard. Snape looked like he was going to honestly murder someone after the 'little brews' comment. Putting aside the likelihood of actual homicide for a moment, the plan for the club sounded like one of the most idiotic lesson plans they had ever heard. With the general curiosity surrounding the club there were almost five hundred people in attendance, and with only one dueling stage it promised to be a very long night. All in all it was what they had come to expect of Lockhart, though they seemed to be alone in that sentiment as the idiot's popularity seemed to still hold most of the hall in its sway.

Lockhart began waxing poetic about the proper method to duel, and after a pair of short bows Snape's disarming spell flung the man like a fuchsia missile across the platform. He attempted to stand back up but, to his visible frustration, it seemed like wearing three layers of silken robes was a poor tactical choice in addition to a poor stylistic one.

Lockhart gave an honest attempt at passing off his complete trouncing as a fine demonstration, and when he caught sight of Snape's face at his assertions that, "Really, an _expelliarmus_ was so pedestrian and very much expected," he immediately diverted focus to something, really anything, else that he thought might make Snape share his gaze filled with pure werewolf rage.

"Ah, well, let's get the duels for tonight started up! Umm, How about we have the youngest male Weasley up here, Ronald my boy! Hop on up! And... Umm... Potter! Why don't you get on up here as well!"

Harry was terrified that his ploy worked, Snape's gaze narrowed at Harry before flicking dismissively to Ron.

"Not Weasley. The boy is more likely to accidentally cast fiendfyre than successfully execute a disarmer. If he faces Potter we'll be calling the mediwitch down to find their remains with direction charms and a magnifying glass. If I may, Malfoy!"

The other blonde idiot strutted up to the dueling stage, and with an undignified hop that quickly became a flop, made his way to the dark and unkempt professor.

"Now Harry," Lockhart was projecting his voice out to the crowd despite his target being two feet away, "If he tries to hit you with a spell, try this move right here."

Lockhart whipped his wand up and began a wide set of concentric circles before attempting a jab and flick that left his wand five feet away on the platform. It took most of what Harry had to not just stun himself to put himself out of Lockhart's misery. With a whispered _accio_ and a sub-verbalized sticking charm, Harry handed the professor his wand back.

"Why don't you try it again professor, knowing proper shielding is important after all."

"Well, I'm sure you got the gist of it from my motion, and the incantation is _encantatis awais_," Lockhart said with a mildly constipated look.

_Encantatis awais. _Enchantment away. Spell away. It wasn't even a real spell. Harry had to mentally revise his estimate of the man, as it appeared he had thrown his wand away to avoid having to actually cast anything and display an ignorance of basic shielding. It was cunning in a very dilute and lazy way.

While the fraud-who-taught was busy _not_ showing him how to protect himself, Harry spied Snape whispering something into Malfoy's ear across the stage from him. Harry had not forgotten his vengeance on the winged potions menace. He had actually managed to assemble most of the delightful little piece of magic he had earmarked for Snape, it was currently just a waiting game until they got closer to the winter holiday, after all it would hardly be a fun revenge if they had to wait through two weeks worth of a coma to see one of the magic world's more _esoteric_ pieces of ritual magic.

While the boy-who-lived stared off into the distance and considered some of the vagaries of combining modern muggle pharmacology with potions, the two professors had retired from the stage and Lockhart had begun counting down to the beginning of his duel with the Malfoy heir.

As the count reached two, the boy across the hall from him cried "_Expelliarmus!_" which overall Harry felt was unsporting, and having effectively drawn his attention Harry now had to actually decide what to do with Draco.

He could duck, ducking was cool. Truth be told he might have to lean into it for the spell to actually hit him. Despite the training he no doubt received from his death eater of a father, the boy was only a second year and his aim left a lot to be desired.

As the red bolt of energy passed the halfway mark between them, Harry considered pulling off a flick maneuver. It was something made popular by Voldemort during the last war, mostly because it was an incredibly dickish showing off move. You essentially had to project raw magical potential to the tip of your wand, and if the amount of power you channeled was equal or greater than the power in the spell flying at you, you could basically re-channel the spell away with the age old swish and flick wand movement.

That was cool, he could do that.

By the time the spell closed with him, Harry had made and discarded a number of reactions, but in the end taking an opportunity to embarrass one of the most annoying students in the school was too great a temptation. Harry raised his wand, and with a grace that belied his age caught the disarming spell on the tip of his wand and just held it there.

"Cool, you did a textbook perfect disarmer, Malfoy. It's a little light in the power category, mind you, but this would probably actually disarm someone if they weren't paying too much attention."

Harry flicked his wand down and directed the small ball of red energy into the floor.

"Think you're so good, do you Potter? You're nothing but just another Hufflepuff loser, unsuited for anything but drudgery and cleaning up after your betters!"

There was a beat of silence. Badgers looked after their own. Even the Weasley twins didn't mess with the puffs too much, because the individual may not be too bad but there wasn't a wizard alive that could stand up to fifty others. Hufflepuffs were everywhere after all, and they were hardcore. The lions, ravens, and snakes with more than a pair of brain cells to rub together all looked at the puffs. The Puffs all looked at Harry. Harry looked at Malfoy. And then he laughed.

Deep belly chuckles filled the otherwise silent hall, leaving Harry bent over and slapping his knee with mirth. He wiped a tear from his eye as he straightened up, and to the consternation of most of the crowd addressed the boy in front of him.

"What Malfoy, is that you? You're my better? You're anyone's better? I haven't laughed that hard since Fred over there spelled every restroom to only admit people of the opposite gender and George got caught in the girl's loo for it. Malfoy, you can't best Ron Weasley, and yesterday he nearly died when he lost his spoon in his mash and found it again half way down his throat! Draco, you're equal to or less than that."

He nearly collapsed in laughter again, and as the littlest male Weasley began an abrupt transition to fire engine red, the entire Badger contingent joined him. The ravens and nearly all of the lions weren't far behind. To Harry's mild consternation, only the most loose of the snakes lost their composure and displayed a smile. Maybe Malfoy wasn't as a strong a name as the blonde idiot (again, he had to specify Malfoy, last year was simpler when there was only one) always implied that it was.

The great hall was filled with laughter, and given that the students had all mixed around (at least three of the four houses had) the sound of eleven through seventeen year olds getting their jollies rang out, it was a loud and all-encompassing sound. It almost didn't bear mentioning that the next incantation uttered was lost in the crowd, Harry for all his flaws still caught the sound though.

_Serpentsoria._

* * *

><p>Great Britain isn't known for its snakes.<p>

It only has four real species of snakes, and one of them shouldn't actually qualify as native. Of those four species only one has any kind of venom, the _vipera berus_, and its venom is at best only very slightly fatal. India is home to _much_ more deadly specimens. Some of its aquatic specimens, despite noted non-aggressive tendencies, are among the most deadly in the world.

Perhaps the statement should be amended though. Mundane Britain isn't known for its snakes. Outside the mundane things like metaphor, tradition, and mythological understanding reign supreme.

The aesculapian snake is native to the UK, but what the mundane understand to be the aesculapian snake is only one facet of the being's real life. Roman myth surrounding the snake related it to healing, and in specific the god of healing. This connotation was entirely due to the fact that the highest level of generalized healing potion is based around the incredibly toxic venom of _Zamenis longissimus magus_, or the magic aesculapian.

Draco Malfoy uttered five syllables, and between him and what he considered to be just another useless Hufflepuff appeared a four meter long ten centimeter thick dark bronze snake.

It immediately coiled in on itself and began hissing in threat. It formed a solid mass which Harry's casual estimate placed at a solid quarter meter square. A single bite would be enough to kill him without anti-venom, and with anti-venom it was enough to leave him in extreme pain for probably a day and a half. And he had fairly strong control over the internal distribution of chemicals in his body.

The crowded room fell silent once again as those born to magic recognized the threat in front of them and those not raised to magic took in a solid three stone of snake. The silence only extended further as hissing sounded out again in the hall, but from a decidedly less reptilian source.

The Aesculapian raised its head two feet up from its coil, and as it cocked its head to the side it hissed again, this time making eye contact with Harry at his position on the end of the dueling platform.

Harry hissed back and the snake began making its way towards the boy. He put his hand down towards the massive bronze creature and it curled around his arm and torso, leaving the ground entirely and perching with its head directly adjacent to the boy's. After settling its weight about the boy it seemed to bark out a short hiss and Harry laughed out loud.

"You weren't! Oh my god!"

The bronze head bounced up and down hissing in what was clearly laughter.

"I'm so sorry, I'm be furious too! But that is also _super_ weird," Harry seemed to realize he had broken back into English, and began hissing again, a huge smile across his face. He hissed his message back to the snake, their conversation the only sound in the hall.

The snake went to say something back, but in the middle broke down into some kind of weird buzzing/choking sound that looked like it was a serpentine equivalent of hysterical laughter. Then someone else joined the conversation.

"P-p-p-potter? You can talk to snakes?"

Harry looked away from his new slithery friend for a moment, and answered with a smile wide on his face, "I know! Isn't it incredible! I thought it was a hallucination! When I was five I was living with my aunt and uncle who were sorta trying to starve the magic out of me. I had to go to the bins to find food and the only thing I had eaten for a few days was half a loaf of moldy bread."

Harry turned to the snake and tickled under its massive jaw as the other witches and wizards in the room struggled to lift theirs from the floor, "In the cupboard where they locked me there was a small hole in the wall and on the third day locked in there a snake came out of it and kept me company for a while. He was really nice and helped distract me from the hunger cramps. By the time I was let back out the snake was gone, so I've always assumed I hallucinated the whole thing. You know, ergot poisoning, like what they thought caused the witch hunts over in the colonies."

Refocusing on the boy across the stage, Harry continued, "And for the record, the things you and your friends do with snakes in your room are disgusting, and Maxwell Phineas Grubnug the Third here," he said hefting the snake, "doesn't appreciate you trying to disinfect him before your little games."

Harry idly flicked his wand and in the same conversational tone said, "_stupefy_," launching a bright red bolt down the stage which impacted on the center of Draco Malfoy's chest. The Slytherin appeared to simply pass out where he stood, and while he did so Harry descended from the dueling platform and made his way to the doors of the great hall and outside, hissing happily all the way.

So wide was his smile and so happy was his demeanor that he completely missed the silence surrounding his every move since the snake was summoned. His feet barely contained a skip from his step as he crossed the hall, with the crowd parting before him like he was a snakey-Moses.


	22. Chapter 21: Sweet Revenge, also Ghosts

Chapter 21

Parseltounge, the magical ability to speak the language of snakes (and by extension a curious number of other reptiles) is a trait feared and loathed on the British Isles. Many wizards in the past, notably Herpo the Foul, had used the ability to tremendous and terrible consequence. In the tradition of Herpo the Foul, many aspiring dark lords had used the power to gain control of Basilisks, imported Brazilian Quetzalcoatl, or any of the dozens of other _incredibly_ poisonous magical snakes to terrorize or outright assassinate people. Snakes evidently either not having anything better to do, or just being very easily persuaded.

Harry was understandably concerned to find he shared such a significant trait with so many people who had taken to following the tradition of a man who had earned the _nom de guerre_ of 'The Foul'. It was almost enough to inspire him to take another shower, but having taken two after he made the Aesculapian laugh so hard it peed itself while wrapped around him, Harry thought he had spent enough time getting clean.

The next week saw the population of Hogwarts struggling to deal with the fact that their duly nominated and elected twelve year old savior was a parselmouth and a dark wizard. First generation students started skirting around him in the hallways, and Slytherin students and the odd blood purist Ravenclaw could be found eyeing him in the halls with a curious and contemplative gaze.

It was the kind of thing that would drive an impressionable pre-teen up the wall. Thankfully Harry was already firmly bunkered down on the ceiling, and had the whole of Hufflepuff behind him. Puffers stayed together, and after Harry translated a half score of conversations to the odd badgers with a snake, their support was beyond question.

Instead, the studies of the friends grew a new dimension. There were a lot of rumors surrounding the 'powers of parseltongue' as used by Salazar Slytherin, and while none of the founder's materials they had did anything more than hinting, it was said that the curses and spells uttered by him in the tongue of the snakes were devastating. Everyone kept an eye out for anything that might fall under the category of 'snakey' and Harry went deeper into the source material Rowena had left behind in her weird research room.

The woman had left behind a lot, and if her writing style and obsessive attention to detail were any kind of real marker, she would have given Hermione a solid run for her money. Both of their solid type-A personalities would not have abided the mystery of spells cast in a language they couldn't understand, so if the old Slytherin had been capable of something using Harry's newly discovered power, there would be mention somewhere.

There was _some_ trouble in the halls. It was Hogwarts after all. The Weasley twins, long known (and long suffered) troublemakers that they were, took to preceding him in the corridors. They would cast mild darkening charms to give his passage a little atmosphere, and then warn all comers that the next Dark Lord was coming. It amused Harry so he didn't see any reason to dissuade the pair from their self-assigned heraldry, though he did take the opportunity to stick name tags hidden under notice-me-nots to them whenever he could (never let it be said that Neville wasn't just a bit brilliant when it came down to it). In the end it didn't matter if he caught the right twin with the right label, just having everyone call them consistent names for a whole day and throw off what was almost certainly their favorite joke was worth what small trouble they brought.

Their younger brother didn't take too kindly to any part of the revelation, and alongside the young red head the scion of the Malfoy family seemed to be upset that a lowly puff had not only shown him what for, who dat, and similar notions, but also that a badger of all people had the power to speak to snakes.

Both second year idiots did their level best to goad, coerce, and generally shame their Hufflepuff year mates into conflict.

"Potter belongs in Slytherin!"

"HE"S A BLOODY DARK LORD!"

"No worthless badger deserves to use the gift of the lord of our house!"

"You're just some jumped up half blood Potter!"

Harry honestly believed that even as dense as the pair of wayward kids were, constantly being hit by low level prank spells by nearly every seventh year wearing yellow and black would have broken through to them. His own glamours switching their house colors or spelling their robes to appear invisible only to them should also have taught them his last name was Bones, but what could he do? Well, what could he do short of tying them down and breaking some of their less vital bones until they came around to his way of thinking. It was stuff like this that made Harry question why he wasn't going into the whole dark lord racket, but Susan insisted that their mum would be pissed in the yank sense, and then shortly thereafter in the proper sense if she ever heard him say things like that.

* * *

><p>Transfiguration, charms, astronomy, and defense all kept pace. Which is to say McGonagall, Sinestra, and Flitwick knew their stuff, and Lockhart continued lecturing on the finer points of dental floss as a subset of general dental care in relation to dark wizard capture.<p>

Herbology was spent examining the Mandrakes while they were repotted. Their development placed them in something of a primary school age, so the current challenged was keeping them from eating the packs of crayons they had found somewhere, and keeping the smaller ones from pots of paste taken from the same unknown location.

Snape, and by extension potions, just kept getting worse. With the help of a few of the more knowledgeable sixth years the friends got their cauldrons warded against switching spells as well as the enhancements they had put together for Harry before the incident with the fungus, and in light of the new protections there hadn't been a new explosion in the combination Ravenclaw Hufflepuff class. Which was _not_ to say that Harry's revenge was being put off. The final piece to the puzzle, a magically reactive cousin to the _psilocybe villarrealiae_ mushroom indigenous to some parts of Mexico, was set to arrive by owl post just before break.

Harry and his motley crew began spending more and more time in the library. The Scottish winter was incoming, so as the days trended towards yule, the weather began its own trend towards inhospitable.

It had been a week and a half since they doubled down on their normal out of class research, and despite having set time aside for the season's first snowball fight, Harry's inaugural dark lord activities, and the whole dueling club fiasco, it was decided to bring their separate projects back together.

"Okay, so working on the assumption that the thing petrifying people is a creature, mostly because if it's a person I'm not a qualified crime scene investigator in either the mundane or magical worlds, I've identified some possible candidates for causes," Hermione began.

"The most obvious candidates are a gorgon, a medusa, some different types of lamia, the cockatrice, it's partner and sometimes foe the basilisk, and finally there are a number of reports of petrifaction being done by the old Norse 'black elves' or svartálfar. Though I found two separate references claiming the main writer of the Old Norse legends, Snorri Sturluson, was either a magical seeker of ancient lore, or a drunken muggle with too much time on his hands.

If we ever do this research gig again, I'm picking something different. Learning that almost all of the mundane stories about fantastic creatures are really just small breaks in the statute of secrecy, and that everything my parents told me wasn't real are actually just hanging around seedy bars in some of the more hidden parts of Greece is terrifying."

She managed to get her whole story out in two breaths, which was actually an improvement, they had been working on for her. The consensus held that going for more than three minutes between breaths to get a story out was probably a bad thing biologically speaking, so the friends had been working with her. Neville and Hannah picked up the research thread.

"As far as Hannah and I could figure out with the mandrakes, there isn't much we can do to accelerate their growth. They have to actually grow up the whole way, so even if we sat them down and managed to get them start dating _and_ showed them how to pay taxes, they still wouldn't be grown up enough to harvest."

Hannah sat forward and put a hand on Neville's, "Because they need to actually age, we looked a bit into a couple of the more standard time magics, but almost everything that makes you experience more time subjectively also ensures you don't over-age, or whatever it would be called. So there really isn't anything we can do unless any of Harry's crazy ancestors found a way to make themselves older."

At his contemplative look, and subsequent dismissive head shake, they moved on down the line.

Susan and Nym (Harry felt that it was in line with their more violent natures) each sat straighter at the table to give their own reports.

"We've never really looked into the more dark or painful curses before, so we decided to take a reverse approach. Try to find what caused petrifaction, then work backwards to find a defense. It was weird though, I found seventeen different books named 'Magicks Most Foule'. Like with a 'k' in magic and 'e' at the end of foul. How is that even a word? And how are any of them even outside of the restricted section?" Nym just shook her head and went on, "I think the witches and wizards back in the day thought they were really dark and stuff, but were actually just kinda incompetent. It looks like most of the people with stuff like blood boiling and entrail expelling curses were all just lazy wizards who stole from their mum's old cookbooks. The blood boiling was just to cook an animal the lazy way, and the entrail expelling was just to help clean them. The seventeen different 'Wizards moste foule'," she said with a spooky look and finger wave, "Just found different ways to make the spells hurt more."

The strawberry red girl picked up the report, "We found a number of things that were _sorta_ like a petrifaction, but nothing like what we saw with Dobby and Mrs. Norris. Things like the draught of living death induce the same coma like state, there were records of some Egyptian spells involved with the mummification process that did similar things, but overall there was nothing we could find, transfiguration, charm, or potion that could exactly replicate the effect we saw."

Nym jumped back in with, "Basically we didn't find anything extremely helpful, but that doesn't write off the idea that it's some student walking around. It could be someone with notes like Harry has from his family, or some other artifact or potion we haven't heard of. We are twelve you know."

There was a general nod of assent. They were kids, it wasn't like they were going to be the ones to break this open. But it did leave them in the lurch for something concrete they could defend themselves with.

"Luna and I have taken to going through Rowena's journals again. She had something like seventy-eight in total, and near as we can tell they don't contain any significant references to petrifaction. She did look into parsel-magic, and according to journal thirty-eight, she caught old man Slytherin incanting in the snake tongue a few times. Without being able to speak it herself her notes aren't helpful though."

Luna piped up from beside him, "For what it's worth, it seems like the old snakey bastard used it primarily for healing, and when he was really mad. Parseltongue is a magical language, but we don't bloody know if spells cast in it act like spells cast in any other foreign tongue, or if the magic and exclusivity of the language add something into the mix. To figure it out for ourselves we'd have to have an incantation and probably NEWTs in arithmancy, so this one is likely going to be a bust."

Harry leaned on to his arms on the tabletop, and the group turned to him, "It seems like we don't have any good news. The effect could be caused by any of a half dozen critters, it could be a blind spot in the library, or any of a hundred other things. So we don't have a good defense. There just isn't much for it. I hate to say this about the old git, but I think Dumbledore had the right of it.

Something fishy is going on, and if it involves the chamber of secrets and something left by Slytherin, we can't afford to tip off the wider world because it could blow up and we'd lose the only chance to confine the damage. I mean so far it's only hit a kneazle and an elf, but I don't want to picture what would happen if what or whoever is doing this decided to take a stroll down Diagon alley for lunch."

Harry tipped his head to Susan as he continued, "Besides, mum is always saying how long it takes the minister to authorize any large action by the aurors. I don't even know if every auror the country has would be enough to actually search Hogwarts from top to bottom, even if I got the stupid pervert castle to help out."

Harry's eyes took on a faraway cast as a voice in the back of his head called out, "I HEARD THAT."

He shook himself slightly and continued, "Anyone have any better ideas? I mean I guess we have a lot of data that the adult types don't have in the form of the journals from my ancestors, but realistically we haven't found anything that would actually help the aurors or the professors figure this out. I think we just need to be careful and keep our heads down."

There was a general round of nods. The friends were short on options and defensive magics.

"Now I don't know about ya'll, but I want a snack, and given how much more of the castle the little guys take care of, I'm gonna swing by the kitchens and pass the bad news along to the elves. Anyone wanna come grab an apple?"

The second years begged off in favor of the charms extra credit Hermione had managed to squeeze out of Flitwick the week before, and with Luna raiding the books Hermione's had searched for magical creatures (The Quibbler's current theories about the mythical snorkack revolving around the possibility that no one had survived seeing it instead of it being hard to find) Harry went food hunting solo.

Griffy appreciated the information, even lacking as it was, and Harry headed back north to the library, laden down with a few peaches despite the season.

The kitchens rested comfortably down the corridor from the badger's sett on the first level of the dungeon. The dungeon level up to the ground floor was straight forward, and the entrance hall was an easy transition from the ground floor to the second. The stairs from three to four and four to five lined up with each other, assuming of course it wasn't either a Tuesday or the thirteenth of the month. Unfortunately the stairs from levels two and three (assuming you skipped out on the passage from two to four that required you pass through the hall here the walls literally had a layer of ears covering them) were on opposite sides of the main wing of the school, so unless Hogwarts moved the stairs for you, you ended up having to move the entire length of the wing three times to get from ground floor to the library.

Magically influenced architecture got complicated as the subject gained sentience and the desire to show itself off.

Harry was going through his second circuit when he happened across his favorite Gryffindor ghost hanging in the air above the floor in a hallway intersection halfway down the wing. For some reason the still entirely headless nick was holding his head in his arms with the most afraid expression Harry had ever seen on his face.

There was no apparent danger anywhere, so Harry wasn't too worried. Nick looked like he was staring down the hallway, so Harry sidled up and looked in the same direction. The hall was empty.

Looking to his left and right, Harry took another step towards the as of yet unmoving form of his incorporeal friend, and ignoring the sensation of a cold shower, he put an elbow into the old knight's side.

"Hey Nick, what's up? You look like you've seen a gho... Er... Well you know something bad."

"Nick?"

Harry took a closer look at his only undead friend, only to pause and consider the statement. Undying and nonliving didn't count, and he was only acquainted with the friar so...

As he was running through how many people and things he knew with weird placement on the life/death continuum, he had been circling Sir Porpington, and as he passed in front of the ghost he finally noticed that across the hall intersection from the ghost stood the petrified form of Justin Finch-Fletchley.

And the afternoon had been going so well too.

* * *

><p>Good or bad, Harry mused, life was always interesting. He had only one peach left, and it's time on this earth was limited, but given that he had started out with six, that meant he had been on this chair outside Madam Pomphrey's office for a while now.<p>

The professors had wanted to know how he had found Justin and Sir Nick. Of course the explanation that he just wanted an apple hadn't gone down well for both Snape and Dumbledore, thought thankfully Sprout was always ready to defend her little ones. Harry really tried to justify Dumbledore's aggressive confusion for the fact that he had gone down for an apple and come back with a half dozen peaches, but it rang hollow.

Wanting to tell them that 'life's a peach, and then you die' during the whole interrogation hadn't helped.

There was only a week and a half until winter break, he decided, they all just needed to make it to break, and then they'd have a full safe month to relax.

* * *

><p>Three days after the incident, and Hufflepuffs ensuing response (mostly a redecoration of a four foot sphere around Justin's bed into yellow and black and the establishment of a visitation schedule), Harry was under his father's cloak hidden in the shadows under one of the wavering torches that 'lit' the dungeons near snake territory. Upon reflection Harry had to confess a little respect for the Slytherins. Most of them may be bullies and jerks, but damn they could keep a good theme going. Unfortunately he had more pressing concerns than the fashion and stylistic sense of a group of teenagers trying to fit with the ideals of a millennia dead potioneer.<p>

He was being trailed again, he could tell.

It had been happening more and more recently, which was worrying. It had started after one of his jaunts down to Norbert and Hagrid, he had made his nose more sensitive in an effort to figure out what Fang found so fascinating about Nym's hair. After embarrassing the ever loving hell out of his favorite metamorph, and concluding that the dog loved the color pink more than the shape-changing girl's shampoo, he had neglected to change back when they left. They went as far as the entrance hall before the scent in the air connected dots he hadn't even known were there.

It was a little strawberry and vanilla, along with a hefty dose of what could only be a particularly vinegar-y potion. It was raw and new, even among the scent of a few score poorly washed boys and as many sharply perfumed girls. And it was always new.

Just before he left the library and found Sir Nick and Justin, it had been there. It was there often when he got up in the mornings to pester the elves for waffles, and it was all over where he usually sat in the great hall basically every day. It was practically the only sent through a few of the halls on the second floor, and right now, it was wafting down the hall towards him from just outside prime Slytherin stomping grounds.

Harry was frustrated. Out of all the days to be stalked by someone, the eve of Nym's revenge was not it!

It had been hard enough to secure Hogwart's help getting through the wards Snape had around his quarters, he wouldn't waste any kind of favor he could bargain for on the name of a particularly annoying tail. It had been bad enough explaining how physical sensations could be associated directly with pleasure to an insensate pile of magical stone.

Harry flicked his wand, renewing the silencing charms on his trainers, and set off once again under death's own cloak. Snape wasn't going to poison himself with mild opiate and major psychedelic after all.

The torch he positioned himself in the shadows of lay just down the hall from Snape's quarters. For the purposes of his current mission, he kept a large part of his focus on the place in his head where he heard the voice of the castle. Hogwarts said that as long as he did that, he could pass unmarked through the death eater's wards. It had been a little dodgy on the how, but with the promise that it could happen, Harry indulged in his age old policy of not looking gift griffons in the mouth. Or eyes.

He slowly approached the door to the creepy dungeoneer's rooms, and at the voice in his head's urging (wow, he had problems) he walked to the wall directly to the door's right. Muttering mild recriminations under his breath, he stepped closer to the wall, and with a fervent hope that the school didn't have a terrible sense of humor on top of its terrifying sex obsession.

One step and he was touching the wall.

Another and he was in full body contact.

Feeling like a fool, he moved as if to take yet another step and with a _**SLORP **_that would haunt his dreams for easily the next day and a half, he passed through the rough stone blocks of the wall, and into the room beyond.

Snape's room was just as dreary as his personal hygiene. The walls, where they were exposed, were painted an incredibly dull grey. You could hardly see the color though, as they were postered with reagent tables, anatomy diagrams, drawing of men and women being held under the most hideous spells, and more paraphernalia that shouted 'Dark Wizard' about as loud as could be.

Before he could stop himself, harry instinctively whispered, "Sweet Aido Quedo, could he be _more_ of a stereotype?"

"QUIET MEATLING."

"Just 'cause I have organs and bones and feelings, you get all snippy."

There was no response from the castle, so Harry moved deeper into Snape's lair. In a back room, laying in a green bed so dark it may well have been black, Harry found his target.

"_Somnus duo,_" rang out in the otherwise silent room three times. Now was the time to be sure of what he was doing, and not to leave anything to chance. Harry approached the bed, and from an expanded pocket inside his robe, he withdrew a small container and a brush.

He tapped the brush with his wand, a light golden glow flowing along the wood and kneazle whiskers until the whole instrument lit the area around Snape's bed. Dipping the brush in the paste from the container, Harry adjusted his sleeve out of the way and began scribing a trio of Mayan hieroglyph blocks onto the potions master's head.

_Ch'am way chok._

He would have freely admitted that his Mayan was a little rusty, so his grammar was probably about as good as the man who he was writing on, but the glyphs _should _have translated roughly to 'gather and scatter the mind'. It depended on how you read it, Harry guessed. Thankfully intent was more important than grammar.

As the final glyph block was finished, the set of three began glowing, the color of light they cast into the room moving gently along the entire rainbow. The light show went on for exactly three minutes and thirty seconds, two hundred ten seconds if you wanted to be specific or seven multiplied by five multiplied by three multiplied by two if you wanted to be technical. Magic really did seem to like prime numbers. A smile peeked out from atop a hastily conjured stopwatch as the light faded, the timing indicating that step one was a success. With his work on the man's body done, Harry left the man and his dark room for the second part of the binary ritual.

Skulking under his cloak into the great hall, Harry used finely ground table salt to draw a set of interlaced heptagons underneath the door head of Slytherins chair. Five seven-sided shapes were laid atop one another, and said amalgam was repeated two more times to both the left and right of the chair. Seven, five, three, and two again. Add in the 'one' of Snape himself, and the repetition of the first five primes should all combine to set the fireworks off just as he sat in his chair for breakfast the next day. A few weak sticking charms secured the salt to the ground so it would not be scattered if it was stepped in, and an entirely non-magical strip of carpet covered the entire set-up. Harry knew from talking to Drip and Drop (who despite their eccentricities were still somehow assigned to answering the direct calls of the staff) that Professor Sprout had been asking after a small carpet for under the staff chairs so they would make less of a hideous scrape when pulled out, so his whole ruse should go undetected.

With his painstaking drawing and spell work done, Harry headed back to the sett. He'd be up early as usual, but tomorrow he'd give a whack at a patronus messaging charm so Nym would be up with him. He'd only done a little work with the patronus, but given the notes Lily had left Harry suspected he'd figured it out in enough time for the pair of metamorphs to catch every moment of their carefully planned revenge.

* * *

><p>Nym groggy.<p>

Nym unhappy.

Morning.

Nym not like morning.

Nym go back to sleep.

Nym _try_ to go back to sleep and ignore weird feeling in toes.

_Sigh._

With her hair cycling through a rainbow of colors that would warn the entire animal kingdom of something poisonous and angry, she opened her eyes to find the inside of her four-poster bed bathed in a warm silver glow.

It bore investigation, but she still didn't want to leave bed.

Leaning up slightly, she looked down towards the strange tickling at her feet, only to find a glowing silver beaver nibbling carefully on her toes. It was beautiful, like someone made a clear water balloon in the shape of a beaver, and then filled it with molten silver. There were visible currents and movement inside the small beast's structure. Nym knew what beavers were, Harry's love for zoos meant she had considerable creature knowledge just by diffusion, but she had never thought of them as particularly _pretty _before.

Nym sat further up, moving her feet from under the pearly mammal's teeth to a space beneath her. The beaver seemed to notice that she was now fully awake, and waddled its way closer to her. As it got closer she stretched her arms out to the little guy, and it climbed right in like it was made for it. The beaver's entire body seemed to radiate a sense of peace and contentment, so she couldn't help but squeeze the little thing in her arms.

It was right about then that the beaver opened it mouth and Harry's voice whispered out, "_Hello, I am the murder beaver, I'm here for your ssssoooouuuuulllll._"

Nym screamed and threw the animal from her arms, only for it to travel as far as the bottom of her bed before floating in place above her bed. Harry's laughter and voice began echoing from it almost immediately, "HAHAHAHAHAHA! Oh man, I wish I was there to see that! I bet you totally cuddled with Mr. Beaver and then completely freaked out! Hahahaha! Oh man. Ha. Anyway, get up and come over to the common room. You can murder me, then when you're done we'll head to breakfast, I have a gift for you."

With its message delivered, the beaver seemed to shrug and look apologetic, then burst into a cloud of silver motes that rapidly dispersed in the air over the bed.

Nym unhappy again.

* * *

><p>The Hogwarts clock tower rang out seven times, calling out the early hour to the still mostly asleep castle. Classes started at nine thirty, and most of the elective classes around noon, so most everyone were still deep in Morpheus' lands.<p>

Harry, sporting a bruised sholder he wasn't allowed to remove or repair, and Nym sat entirely alone at the Hufflepuff table, their only company being a few of the more industrious Ravenclaws, a pair of seventh year Slytherins, and curiously enough, what appeared to the Gryffindor Quidditch team. Word was, their captain ran them ragged most of the time, apparently the rapidly approaching holidays weren't enough for him to cancel.

By the time the seventh and final toll of the bell finished echoing through the halls their target arrived.

A quick elbow to the ribs got Nym's attention, though her expression led Harry to believe that he might be paying for it more later, "Wake up, it's game time."

"You still haven't told me what my stupid 'gift' is. In a perfect world it wouldn't be legal to wake up before eleven thirty," Nym hissed out between clenched teeth.

"You needed to be here for this," Harry looked up, Snape was only about halfway to his customary seat, "When you were injured in potions, I asked you to not bring this to any of our parents, I told you it wouldn't do any good, and I told you I'd take care of it. No one hurts my friends and walks away unscathed."

Nym seemed very surprised by the sudden steel in Harry's tone, a glance showed them both that the hated man was nearly upon the staff table.

"What I have arranged won't hurt him physically, but after this morning he should lapse into around a thirty-five day coma. After which he will either be a completely different man, or he will be a broken shell of a person," Harry took Nym's hand from where it rested on the table, and stared directly into her eyes, "No one hurts my friends. Now I said this once before, but I'll say it again now. They always say that diamonds are a girl's best friend and that diamonds are forever, but so are crippling psychological injuries, so please accept the following from me."

Harry's timing could not have been any better if he had tried. As he finished his statement Snape sat down with his usual robe flare, and as soon as he made contact with his seat the latent magic from the runes Harry drew the night before activated the geometry he laid down on the floor under the carpet, and the hall was treated to a visual effect much like if you pointed a series of rainbow colored strobe lights at rapidly spinning disco ball.

It being Hogwarts and magic being... well... magic, the two Slytherins were on their feet almost as soon as the lights started up. They reached their favorite professor almost as the light show ended.

"Professor! Professor! Are you well!?"

The largest of the pair went for a more direct route, and simply lifted the hook nosed man to his feet from where he had fallen. With a wave of his hand he sent the other snake off, Harry guessed to find Pomphrey.

Snape seemed to mutter, and to withdraw inside himself as the seventh year stood guard over him. In a trice the school's healer was next to the man waving her wand and whispering under her breath, She looked as if she was about to perform a spell on the man, but just as she was about to cast Snape stood forward and swept her to the side.

"No! You don't understand! None of you understand! Have you ever watched the Wizard of Oz? Like really watched it? Have any of you raked a yard full of leaves, _truly_ raked the whole yard? I have felt the ocean breezes on my face, and now? Now I am KING! KING OF THE BUTTERFLIES!"

By the time he finished spittle flew from his mouth as he shouted into the face of the seventh year that had helped him stand. Madam Pomphrey looked more afraid than anyone else in the hall, and Harry was nearly certain that one of the gaggle of Ravens had actually peed themselves.

Snape peeled his robe off of his shoulders, and started removing the long shirt he wore underneath it. The entire great hall was paralyzed as he strode to the doors to the entrance hall, shrugging out of his clothes as he went, until finally he stood naked silhouetted against the outside world, his naked and pale buttocks gleaming slightly in the light.

With a final cry of "KING OF THE BUTTERFLIES!" he launched himself over the threshold to the outside world, screaming in laughter as he ran.


	23. Chapter 22: Hallucinating Christmas

Chapter 22

He opened his eyes slowly, but as soon as the outside world intruded on his poor retinas, he was forced to close them again. It was _bright_ out.

As he made the transition from unconscious to conscious, he stumbled. His poor mind farted for a second, _he stumbled?_

He was walking. He opened his eyes again, dealing with the sunlight and taking a first look around. He was talking with a group of unshirted and sweaty young men on the side of a massive blacktop thoroughfare. _The Coronado Freeway_ came the knowledge from the back of his mind. He stopped moving for a minute. The sun beat down on him and the people with him like a drum, he could hear the sound of the sun beating down, and it seemed to cool him just as much as the rays from heaven warmed him.

The area around them was desolate, rough sand, harsh blacktop, sharp rocks. In the distance he saw a large city, _Albuquerque_, he knew it was his destination, he resumed walking.

It took him half a dozen steps, but he realized his hands were in front of him, and they were oddly heavy. Looking down, the weight was due to a large glass bottle secured tightly to either palm. From what he could see, the bottles were labeled 'Olde English 800 - Malt Liquor', and his mind whispered another fact at him, they were nearly full forty ounce bottles. The glass containers were held to his hands by a large amount of a silvered adhesive tape, _Duct tape, purchased at the Walmart off of Route 40 in Grants._

But why were his hands so constrained? _Edward Fourtyhands - a game played where two 'forties' are duct-taped to your hands and you must drink them both in their entirety before they may be removed._

He walked idly for more than half a mile, just staring to the fluids in the bottles attached to his hands as they moved, flowed, and shook to the beat of his movements. The sun glinted off the surface of the liquid blindingly, and broke him from his observance. Why was he here? His eyes were drawn to his right hand, where (in a small plastic bag) a small piece of rigid paper was trapped in the grey wrapping around his hand. He could just barely make out the words written on it, '_The Crack Dealers'_. What the devil was that?

_A concert ticket, I'm going there._

He walked another half mile before the most important question finally occurred to him. Who am I?

A smooth but harassed voice spoke to him from centimeters away from his right ear, "We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold."

He jumped almost a foot in the air, splashing a small amount of his liquor onto his bared chest, "WHO THE FUCK!"

A deep and heavily accented laugh met his exclamation, "HAHAHAHAHAHAHA! It get me every time!"

A strong hand slapped his back, he could feel the vibrations from the move reverberate through his whole body.

"My name is not important, important thing is your name. You, my friend, are Severus Snape, potions master, death eater, boggart, and general all-around asshole."

He, Snape, looked to his right and saw a massive hulking figure in what looked like black combat fatigues. Strapped across his chest was the most massive rifle he had ever seen, strapped to his thigh was something Snape would associate more with field artillery than pistols, and strapped all around the massive man's body were a series of knives, pouches, and what appeared to be Soviet flags.

"You may ask, who is this? I will tell you. I am Russian soldier in dream you are having," The large man waved his fingers in front of Snape's face, making a 'wooOOOooo' noise, "I am here to act as guide. This will be journey of spirit and mind, and I am anchor for you. We journey together to find real you, expose you to universe, see Crack Dealer's concert in Albuquerque, many things. We have fun! You will see. For now we walk, friend."

Now with a massive Russian arm around his shoulders, two forty ounce malt liquors firmly in hand, Severus Snape walked slowly down the side of a highway on his way to a performance of 'The Crack Dealers' in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

It was funny, he thought, he'd never been to the colonies before.

* * *

><p>The Hogwarts rumor mill, in many ways, put paid to the old idea that the only things faster than light are rumors and bad news. When you add the two together it was easy to understand why the house of snakes wasn't ken on venturing much beyond the darkness of the dungeons they called home.<p>

Snape was attacked (the disco explosion being a rather obvious intentional magic effect) in broad daylight, and given how quickly they found out, the other houses would likely be on alert for the fact that their patron was out of the fight.

By the time Neville guided grumpy, sleepy, happy, and doc up to the table, Snape's motionless and stitchless form had been reclaimed from where it lay in the middle of the grounds. He had run around, letting the sun firmly shine in places most would rather it not, and after proclaiming his dominion over butterflies for a final time, proceeded to fall flat on his face.

Harry wasn't sure what he liked out of the experience more, Nym's satisfied smile as she covered her eyes to avoid the sight before her, or Hagrid's pinched expression as he lifted the immobile form of the potions master over his shoulder to bring him into the castle. Madam Pomphrey hastily conjured a sheet to cover the pale man, and in moments Snape was with her having diagnostics run on him in the Hospital wing.

He sat happily at the Hufflepuff table, Nym to his right, Luna to his left, Hedwig on his shoulder, and bacon abounding. As he split a rasher with his favorite phoenix, Harry couldn't help but reflect that life was pretty good sometimes. The one consistent downside to the first half of the year had been a distinct lack of his favorite French Veela, but as soon as Christmas break started up even that was going to be resolved. He didn't even have potions today!

As his gaze swept along the table Harry sobered a bit. Good day or not, they were still down a badger. The petrifactions would get sorted though, one way or another.

* * *

><p>The Express ride back to London was mostly fun for everyone involved. Potions lessons had been entirely cancelled for the final week of the term, given that the professor nominally responsible for them had to be admitted to St. Mungo's for an inexplicable magically induced coma, so spirits were riding very high.<p>

The friends nearly over-filled a compartment, prompting Nym to stare longingly out the window with thoughts of occupying her favorite metamorph's lap, and Luna's lack of social graces prompting her to simply offer to do the same. Harry, to the poor kid's credit, blushed and with a drawn square and a jab, expanded the room.

Taking one corner seat, and filling his lap purposefully with Hedwig, he led the friends in settling in. When everyone had staked their upholstery based claims, and the train finally got moving the group got together in an attempt to transfigure a working monopoly board and correct pieces and dice. Nym was banned from making dice (having been caught shaving them for more advantageous results), Harry was banned from making the board (having continually forgotten the correct positions of the railroads and utilities), and Luna was banned from any part of the process (being incapable of removing her unique world view from the standardized format of the game).

To make a long story short, Harry, Nym, and Luna were forced to sit on their hands while Susan, Hannah, Hermione and Neville did the work. When the board was made, and the pieces fairly distributed, Luna took over as banker and the friends began to play.

It made the hours between Scotland and London pass relatively quickly, despite its propensity to devolve into unions of different corporate interests fighting tooth and nail amidst Luna's typical high interest loans and Hermione's insistence that real world commerce did not include banks offering money in exchange for vows of allegiance in the case of world domination and signed statements of agreement on the existence of various magi-crypto-zoological theories.

She spent a lot of time being frustrated with Luna, who called her a cloffing pempslider and stuck her tongue out.

At hour three (Metamorph LLP and Greenhouse Lovers Ltd. considering a merger while Abbot Enterprises, The Librarian Appreciation CIO, and Bonington plc [Why do you all keep laughing!?] look on) the game was interrupted.

Interrupted may have been overstating it a little though.

Everyone remembered the tediousness of Malfoy coming by during the ride to Hogwarts last time, so it was a group effort to make sure the door was closed, locked and warded against any kind of annoying interference almost as soon as seats were established. To that end the door had been hit by a different colloportus by each of them, Harry had transfigured the wheels the door rolled on into a solid joint between the door and walls, and Hermione inked an elementary locking rune into the wall beside the door. In case of emergency they had each made sure to key their spells to a word so everything could be undone at once, but until the phrase "My mother will hear about this!" was used, they were securely locked in.

So as the third hour of their game rolled by, the fifth epic clash of the corporate entities of the Hufflepuff dorms was interrupted by the sounds of a person straining to open the doors. Everyone stopped what they were doing (Nym's bribe dangling from her hand in front of Neville's face) and looked up.

"It won't bloody open!" the door shook slightly, as if struck, "Goyle! Open it!"

Fourteen eyes stared unmoving at the inside of the door as the handle jiggled and the sound of a twelve year old gorilla pulling on it passed through the crack.

More grunt than words, "Won't open."

"Hmph! Crabbe, go get Flint. I will not be denied!"

Neville eventually grabbed the Gulping Plimpy themed pair of five hundred pound notes dangled in front of him, and the game was back on while they waited for the sixth year quidditch captain to make an appearance.

Abbot Enterprises and Bonington plc were halfway through a vicious bidding war for Bond Street, being auctioned by the United Bank of Luna, when the scrabbling on the other side of the door resumed.

"_Finite._ Ah shit, BOLE! Hey Bole, is it a slash or is it slash and jab? Never bloody remember..."

"Neither, idiot," came another voice, "just go with a circle and diagonal, _finite incantatem_, yeah? S'what Snape did on ye when those twins had ya as a slug."

Hermione was visibly restraining herself from correcting the pair of Slytherins, and Harry and Nym were holding on to each other for support in their ultimately futile attempt to not burst out in laughter.

"Right, _FINITE INCANTATEM-"_

There was a short whoosh, and then a bang that rattled the window panes in their places as five bodies impacted the wall on the opposite side of hall. Flubbing an attempt at undoing more than half a dozen spells was always going to seriously backfire on you, just ask any trainer cursebreaker, situations like that were why detection charms and spell identifiers were developed in the first place. In the case of the Slytherin squad outside the door, sometimes it meant getting knocked out and having to be revived by the next prefect to walk through the halls half an hour later.

Twenty minutes until they pulled into the station, an announcement went out over the train letting everyone know how close they were. The mega-corporation of Metamorph and Greenhouse LLP was currently in the lead by virtue of having fallen for the least amount of Luna's sweet loan promises, and therefore being in the least amount of debt. Abbot, Bonington, and Librarians United had come together to oppose the menace to public enterprise represented by their fellows, unfortunately they had fallen prey to the bank's promises of 'It won't be like last time', 'I wouldn't hide terms and conditions from you', and 'I can't do anything, these interest rates are industry standards'.

As the train pulled into the station Luna declared victory for the United Bank of Luna by fiat, and the game pieces were reversed while everyone packed their things back up. When the massive steam locomotive finally came to a stop and the students were allowed to disembark, the final part of the Malfoy plan came together.

With a cry of "My mother will hear about this!" a transformed Harry and Nym led a pack of glamored people out of their compartment and past a still somewhat stunned group of snakes. Crabbe and Goyle began alternately waving a hand in front of their faces and snapping next to their ears to determine if it was a concussion that led to them seeing a parade of no less than seven separate Draco's leave the compartment that they had been staking out, or if they had fallen asleep on duty again and had the same nightmare they usually did.

It was a firmly held belief of Harry's that rolling with an advantage was paramount to success, so the friends all did a credible job of immediately levitating their luggage behind them and making like the proverbial Exorcist. (They got the hell out of there.)

The glamours faded in a moment, and the friends were all rushing to greet the parents they hadn't seen since September.

"How was the term? Anything interesting happen?"

Harry looked at Susan, Susan looked at Harry, and both tried to _not_ look like anything troubling had happened in the last few months, "Oh, you know, just the usual Hogwarts stuff."

The truly scary part was that in many ways they weren't lying.

* * *

><p>Snape sat at a curbside cafe in a small wire chair. The whole building and town around him hand a handmade feel about it. The road was heavily worn cobblestone and the building he sat in front of was labeled with a hand painted wooden sign, Procione Cafe. Across the small and tastefully colored glass table from him was his spirit guide, still clad in black fatigues with his rifle slung across his back.<p>

A waiter swiftly approached the table and fired off a staccato of what Snape could only assume was Italian. It all went over his head, but despite having never even heard the language before, he knew what was being asked.

"Can I get a water with lemon? And a hamburger."

The server left, and in a mere moment he was back at the table with a glass of water and a burger. As soon as the waiter's hands left the plate, Snape snatched up the food, and in a sudden burst of hunger, took a large bite.

/STATIC/

The world picked up and rewound, for a moment all of his reality was consumed by the taste, smell, and texture of a television tuned to a dead channel. He knew the world in a distortion of greys and blacks.

/STATIC/

Snape sat at a curbside cafe in a small no name town somewhere on the Italian coast. Procione Cafe. The waiter approaches and Snape orders a burger and a glass of water with a lemon, looking towards his spirit guide for a moment as if to ask if he wanted anything, but a negligent shake of the head and low wave said no. He turned back the server, confirming his order as it lay.

In a trice, the waiter was bringing out a silver covered platter. Snape felt a considerable hunger rise in himself, and the waiter set the platter before him. With a flourish the cover was removed, revealing two small armadillos furiously copulating.

Snape could only blink and look back up at the server who stood next to him, cover behind his back looking expectantly at the potion's master. When in Rome... he thought tonelessly, and taking up his knife and fork he set in to take a bit of the struggling mammals on the plate before him.

/STATIC/

The electrons and phosphors of the world around him left a coppery tang in his mouth, and for a second time he was consumed by dead signal.

/STATIC/

Snape lay on a small wire chair outside Procione Cafe, just off of Via Appia in the town of Scauri.

Slowly a waiter approaches him, winding between dozens of tables that weren't quite there before, and as he finally arrives he goes to place the ordered hamburger in front of the customer. But there was no customer, and there had never been one. At the table the waiter walked to there is only a soviet commando in full battle dress sitting across from an empty chair with only a picture on it. The picture is of the waiter standing puzzled holding a plate with a hamburger on it next to a table occupied by only a photo and a soviet commando in full battle dress.

/STATIC/

/STATIC/

Snape was an Italian waiter, delivering a plate of armadillo sex to himself as he sat across from a member of the soviet special forces. He spoke only Latin and had never even known a word of Italian. As he approaches the table he is consumed by the sight of a member of the Swiss Guard (so far from Rome) crying gently at a table.

The guardsman looks at a picture of himself holding a picture of a hamburger.

/STATIC/

/STATIC/

Snape orders a hamburger and receives a hamburger from the sweating hands of a waiter that seems suspiciously familiar. He pauses to take a drink from a glistening glass of water that contains a small lemon tree. At the table behind him a Swiss guardsman cries softly with the sounds of a baby armadillo.

The lettuce in the burger is uneasy. It looks with suspicion on the beef. The beef came from a cow that was fed the lettuce from which the burger's lettuce was germinated. There is an uneasy truce. Snape raises the burger to his mouth for another bite, the hamburger getting heavier and heavier as if comes closer to his mouth. Beneath a silver cover and on top of a silver platter a pair of armadillos consider mating and raising a brood of smaller armadillos. It is a location with plentiful food and relative security after all. The burger touches Snape's mouth and he turns slowly to look on the Swiss guardsman who is still crying as he stares into a photograph of a pair of armadillo that seem to be wearing Hawaiian shirts with large cameras suspended around their necks.

/STATIC/

/STATIC/

The world implodes briefly as every electron is briefly transposed with a hamburger, the mass of the seared cow flesh collapsing the planet like a dying star into a point mass and resulting a black hole. Merlin himself hands Snape a precursor to the pepper-up potion, only for gravity to reverse and the vial to fall out of Snape's hand into the sky. Snape is killed. All magical energy on earth is brought to a single point and collapsed into a pair of objects, two furiously copulating armadillos. Snape is alive and watching the armadillos, they stop and stare back at him. The world is amusement. Snape walks through the halls of spinner's end, all of his books performing a credible interpretation of A Midsummer Night's Dream as he passes them in their shelves. In Godric's Hollow a niffler sees a galleon on the ground between two struggling armadillos and lunges for it, only to be smacked on the nose by Snape for interrupting his view of the small creatures. For a moment, every fluid in every human's body on earth is briefly substituted with skele-gro combined with syrup of ipecac. Snape vomits, but as soon as the vomit leave his mouth it disappears and reappears on the floor of the Gryffindor common room. Snape is the Gryffindor common room.

/STATIC/

/STATIC/

Lettuce spies ground beef being grilled, and is filled with hope. Ground beef deserves what it gets. Snape is handed a hamburger, he stares at it. Tears of catsup fall softly from the bun. Earth becomes a secretary filing her nails at a desk, floating off into space, before reverting and proceeding to spin at a ninety degree angle from where it was before. A small cab drives by a cafe near the Italian coast, the car laughing at the driver as he fails to properly stop in front of a police officer. The specific gravity of hamburgers across the globe doubles, no one approves but they can't complain. An undead dormouse in Surrey is given access to a field of infinite knowledge and becomes omnipotent. Nothing changes. In Egypt, circa 17 BCE, a pharaoh spies a pair of armadillos making sweet passionate love on his bed, they become objects of worship. Snape is killed again. The Milky Way galaxy briefly becomes sentient and chooses to wave several billion stars at a passing galaxy by way of greeting. The passing galaxy responds by inventing the hamburger. Snape wakes from death and is de-born into un-life. At his command hamburgers are inducted into the Swiss Guard. Snape reigns over the blasted wasteland of Earth, destroyed by armies of hamburger. Snape is crowned un-pope.

The un-pope is issued a single hamburger. He takes a bite.

/STATIC/

/STATIC/

/STATIC/

* * *

><p>It was Harry's first Christmas since Gabrielle, so it was one he was going to take seriously. During the years where most children formed a basic understanding of the tooth fairy and Saint Nick, Harry was learning how to cook with a fractured ulna, and being told that freaks were beneath the notice of any such creatures. He had a few with his mum, but he had never grasped the point before Gabby had been able to show it to him.<p>

He missed her.

But the Delacours were firmly in France for the year, especially as Gabby was being set up to head to jolly old England the next year. It made sense to him, but he didn't have to like it. The odd letter told him nothing real, and from the distance they were at only the most basic feelings came through the piece of his mind still attached to her. He knew she was well, relatively happy, and in a general south-southeast direction. Beauxbatons was supposed to be really good, and he was frankly glad she missed most of the crap they had faced so far. Snape, Lockhart, petrifactions, and god only knew what else going on at Hogwarts. At least he was a Hufflepuff. No one generally gave a crap about them, so he had another layer to the 'nobody look at the elephant in the room' defense. He really wasn't looking forward to turning seventeen and having the rest of the blood wards that kept the public from unduly noticing him collapse.

Sigh.

He was getting off the mark. Christmas!

Hunting around some of the more pricey owl order catalogs had shown him the existence of an amazing herbologically focused commune in the Himalayas (oddly enough, the inspiration for the legends of Shangri-La). He bought Neville an in to the community and scripts to a number of Abbot and Costello routines. The boy loved plants, and Harry felt their routines could use a little spice.

Hermione was getting 3% ownership of Flourish and Blotts. The magical world didn't really have a stock market as such, but given that Charlus and Dorea Potter had given a rather significant loan to Misters Flourish and Blott when they fell on hard times during the forties, Harry nominally had something like a thirty-three percent interest in the store. Hermione would have enough for free books, but not enough to bother the proprietors.

Susan and Mum were getting the same thing. Harry had been idly picking through an issue of Modern Magical Combat during the summer, and found an advertisement for the International Magical Law Enforcement Expo. Susan wanted to follow after her Aunt, Mum could use a vacation, and new law enforcement techniques and info couldn't hurt. He had also bought two additional tickets for any of her top Aurors to join them.

Hannah's love for healing was well known, so Harry had been sweet talking his favorite medi-witch into offering lessons. She was normally kept busy by the rivalry between the lions and snakes, but she agreed to hold some extra tuition in her spare time. Though Harry felt it might have something to do with discouraging her more frequent patients by having lessons on them.

Nym and Luna were a lot harder to shop for than the rest. Most everyone had a thing. Nature, books, being a copper, whatever. Nym's nominal thing was being a metamorph, but she was also so much more than that. It made it harder. Luna was so all over the place that it was just difficult to pin anything down for her, and he knew how alone she always felt. She needed something really good.

In the end, Harry figured it out though.

Nym was getting a voucher for up to three separate piercings at a mundane tattooist's place. Harry found specially made piercings for her, forged specifically over a cold iron anvil in a smithing ritual that made them dead to magic. If she wanted, she could nominally make any kind of piercing she wanted for herself, but these were magically dead for a reason. They would be a spot of permanence for her, something she couldn't shift, something she could have to focus on. Nym sometimes had trouble with her balance when she shifted herself taller, or increased her mass. Harry didn't even want to consider what boobs would do to her balance. The piercings would help her have something to focus on during the transition, it could help her concentrate.

For Luna he dug through a number of catalogs. He asked Neville, he owled Andi, and he even went as far as asking her. Of course no one had any idea, and she just stared airily at him with a smile on her lips and let him know that he would figure it out. And he did! It took going through a catalog of toys intended for toddlers though. Cuddling Companions* were a toy intended for kids who had trouble sleeping, they could cuddle their plushy animal and in a separate room their parents could cuddle the other, the effects of both would be transmitted to the other, and the child could be comforted all night long in their own room. It was a genius piece of charms work, and if Harry was so bold, a genius gift for an amazing friend who had lost her mother only two short years ago. He kept the corresponding companion for himself, a unicorn he decided to name Lord Stabbington the Blood-born (he had to offset the girlie feelings thing somehow, also unicorns were bad-ass, they had a knife on their foreheads!).

Given their distance, Harry wanted to give Gabrielle a cuddling companion as well. She would love it! But again, given their distance, it wouldn't work. So he had to find something else. Cursory reading into Veela tradition (and hot damn did the race of avian warrior women have some traditions) suggested that the bonding they had be marked by some kind of shared external marking. Children of the sixties had gotten into tattooing, before them it had been traditional wedding rings, before that it had been a bejeweled choker for the lady and a similarly fashioned ribbon wristband for the man. The Victorian era had seen some interesting uses of manticore bone corsets.

Of course all of that brought its own basket of troubles. The external marking was gifted only after community wide approval, or at minimum approval from the clan matron, neither of which he possessed. He hadn't met Gabby's grandma, clan duties having kept her away during the summer emergency. It wasn't like they could go back though, they were entangled, approval or not. In the end he paid through the nose for a Goblin to take photos of some of the raw jewels in his vaults, because past Potters were psychotic enough to keep a chest full of uncut jewels laying around. He selected an emerald nearly the exact shade of his eyes, and a sapphire nearly the shade of hers. On Christmas morning she would wake to a pair of jade earrings and an emerald choker, as well as a smiling picture of him wearing a more manly sapphire necklace in roughly the same style. He hoped she liked it.

Other random 'puffs would wake up to some chocolate, but the jewel of the chocolate crown, a five pound block of the finest cacao beans magic and hard work could make processed lovingly be a clan of Swedish gnomes who had been making chocolate for longer than accurate historical records could track, would be going to Andi. She was the biggest chocoholic he knew, and if she didn't like her gift he'd just hang up his wand and take a long walk of a short pier right then and there.

That covered his family. Everyone else would be getting a small trinket, like the other 'puffs he liked. A copy of some of his mum's notes to Flitwick, a tin of biscuits to McGonagall and an anonymous gift of catnip, some Zonko's products for the prefects and those Weasley twins. The Abbot's were getting some wine from one of the vineyards he had inherited, the Delacours were getting some original sketch books gifted to the Potters from one of their old friends, some fellow named Jacques Fath. Harry knew Appoline was heavily into fashion, and the books had some nice work. He really hoped everyone liked what they had. It would be a good Christmas dammit! It was the first time he actually understood the holiday, and everyone was going to enjoy it if it killed him.

* * *

><p>Snape wiped sweat from his brow before bending at the waist and seating another rice plant seedling deep into the paddy between his feet. A step back and another planted, another step another plant, it faded off into monotony as he and the village around him set the steppes for the beginning of the season. His umanori itched at his waist, the front himo weren't well tied, but to stop work and tie would disrupt the rhythm of the planting.<p>

Wait.

Why, by Samson's glorious pubic hair, was he wearing a field hakama and planting rice in a village on the side of a mountain in japan? What the bloody-

"Peace Snape! I swear, more time I spend with you, more times I see how uptight you are. Relax. Let rhythm consume you. Pause friend, feel the wind."

Looking to his immediate left, Severus saw the now overly familiar Russian. Still in tightly laced black combat boots, a care worn set of black combat fatigues, and with the ever present hand cannon and rifle slung along his thigh and chest. Somehow seeing the man ankle deep in the flooded field and planting seedlings beside him didn't' confuse him as much as it used to.

Wait.

As it used to? Had he done this before?

No. Not worth considering. If he spent too much time trying to figure it out he would only grow madder. For once, he decided he would take his spirit guide's (what the bloody hell? He had a spirit guide?) advice.

Leaning back Snape paused in his work on the rice paddy. The wind blew over the distant tree tops and passed over and through him. His hair, no longer quite as greasy as he recalled it being, blew gently as the kami of air blessed them on its way past.

Snape could feel the area around him as surely as he could feel his own body. In the terrace beside him the Russian stood, his back straight, head back, and eyes firmly closed, just being at one with the world around him. In the terrace above, and the terrace below, men and women both, the whole village stood in the same position. It was worship.

They stood and gave thanks for the cooling wind, for the world around them that sustained them so long as they kept vigilant in the same.

The wind blew, and after a moment Snape returned to his duty, his resolve and will restored. Step, plant, step, plant, step, plant.

As the sun passed overhead the paddy slowly filled, the village's future was made more secure for the coming year with every move. When he filled his sections and finished for the day he moved to the steps that would guide his feet back to the village proper and to the door of his home. He cleaned his feet with a cloth and water left for him at the door, and leaving his sandals he stepped into his home. Waiting for him in the room where he took his food was a woman with flaming red hair, a demure smile upon her face, she handed him a bowl filled with plain rice and small strips of smoked eel. Severus, for the first time in nearly as long as he could remember, smiled as he sat next to her and consumed the simple meal she made for him.

When he finished, Snape collected his own empty bowl and his companion's for cleaning. Without thinking he reached for a... a wand? Wait.

What was a wand? Some form of omamori? He had been thinking of working some kind of magic, but that didn't make sense. What was he going to do, channel the majesty of the kami to clean his dishes? How beyond foolish and arrogant was that? Sparing a chuckle for his own hubris, Snape cleansed the bowls by hand, and went about preparing himself for bed.

The watchful eyes of a soviet commando missed nothing from the exchange, a grin briefly appearing beneath a bushy mustache.

* * *

><p>YAWN.<p>

YAAAAAAWN.

YAAAAAAAAAAAAAWN.

Harry loved his bed. He had, in fact, charmed most of it himself. It was a nice four poster affair, the color of an evergreen in a snowstorm (he had double checked that himself as well), and it was a study in delicious contrasts.

The air inside the bed was charmed to a steady five degrees. It kept it above freezing, but forbiddingly cold, which made falling asleep beneath his warming charm enhanced blankets so much easier. The mattress was laced with a weak cushioning charm, _juuuuust_ enough to complement the mattress without overwhelming it. One animation charm kept his blankets from moving too far and falling off of his bed (as well as stopping him from ever having to make his bed) and another allowed his mattress the freedom to move and actively conform to his shape.

If forced at the point of a wand to describe his bed in a single word, Harry would have gone with perfect. Though truth be told, his love for his bed was so great he would've said the same at the point of a dulled butter knife. Nym called his feelings 'weird', 'bed lust', and 'a crime against decent, god fearing sleepers everywhere', but Harry challenged anyone to live for eight years on a baby mattress underneath stairs and then not have unhealthy feelings for a bed that actively worked to give you comfort. Just because she went to lay down on the bed only for it to conform to her in a way she described as 'bad touch' one time...

He chuckled. Unholy abominations were the best when they came in the form of a semi-intelligent mattress. He couldn't help the naggling feeling that he was missing something though.

It was something important too.

Mentally he reviewed everything he could. No homework. No quarterly mail from the Goblins. No class to get to. He had mailed out all of his presents. His estate had just paid taxes. He knew the elves watched the kitchen, so he definitely had not left an oven on. He had no outstanding warrants, and as he recalled the magistrate in Sheffield County had been willing to call the whole incident a foolish accident and let him off in exchange for time served. He should be in the clear.

Wait, presents.

IT WAS CHRISTMAS!

Harry's face broke into a grin, a grin so wide that had trained medical personnel been in the room there would have been concern for his head falling off. He had four times as many terrible memories of the holiday as he had good, but since Gabby that number had swayed significantly in the other direction. Despite the fact that fully half of the Christmases he had now seen were experienced as a little Veela girl, Harry was excited.

He sprung from his bed, partially assisted by the startlingly prescient mattress, and in a burst of what could really only be an accidentally activated switching spell, was clothed in a moment. With a battle cry of 'CHRISTMAAAS!' he began running downstairs.

What he had neglected to consider, however, was that his normal biological clock woke him in the wee hours of the morning. It had only been Christmas for something like four and three quarters hours. So as he walked, still humming the tune to The British Grenadiers under his breath, right into the family room where the yule tree was kept, he stumbled on to a bit of a scene.

Amelia lay stretched out on one of the couches with her head in Andi's lap, as Andi gently ran her fingers through the senior-most living Bone's hair. Sitting across from them on another couch was a man in his early thirties, but with a look in his eye that said he had seen more than his fair share of aging events. His face carried a number of small scars, and a larger number of lines, but still managed to convey a vitality and sense of power.

He held himself like a predator at rest, relaxed, but with a sense of whiplash power available at a moment. The lines in his body all tensed as Harry broke into the room. He stared at Harry with a hunger in his eyes, drinking every detail in and trying as hard as he could to burn them indelibly into his memory.

Both Amelia and Andromeda's gazes flickered from the man to the boy and back. Harry froze just inside the door at the sight of someone new and as the stranger kept up his unblinking stare at the boy, the silence stretched rapidly into awkward territory.

Suddenly the man started, and with a smile on his face he rummaged around in his pockets before finally finding a ribbon bow in an inside pocket of his dark jacket. With eyes twinkling as hard as a certain old headmaster they all knew, he placed the ribbon on his head at a jaunty angle.

Remus Lupin looked on his best friend's only child, his heart warming at the vision, and calmly said, "Merry Christmas, Harry."

* * *

><p>*The idea for cuddling companions shamelessly stolen from Partially Kissed Hero by PerfectLionheart, who wrote a story that is both awesome and insane. I could not recommend it more highly, it's in my favorite stories if you want a slightly easier time to find it.<p> 


	24. Interlude: The Ballad of Remus J Lupin

Interlude: The Ballad of Remus J. Lupin

Remus J Lupin was a traveled man. Remus J Lupin was also a tired man. They said it wasn't the years, but rather the miles, and he stood as a living example of it.

He had been bitten at an early age, too early, so he lived most of his life as a were. His mother, Hope, had family and friends in low places in the Soviet Union, and he had been bitten by former NKVD agent Fenrir Greyback for actions that had happened without any of their notice back in the motherland. Of course his father, Lyall, had worked in the British Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures, which didn't really convince Greyback to not do what he did best.

In spite of the curse, Remus and his parents moved on with their lives. They did their level best to try and give him a normal life, and he did his best to live it, but the painful transition from human to were every month wore on him as he grew. His parents did their best for him, but he knew just how much of a burden he was to them, and the thought of that hurt more than having his bones and flesh rearranged per the lunar calendar. Through tireless rhetoric and bureaucratic minefields, his parents fought to get him set up at Hogwarts when he was eleven, and from there forward his life had never been the same. On a train destined for an unplottable location in the Scottish Highlands Remus J Lupin met two boys named James Potter and Sirius Black, as well as a rat made human named Peter Pettigrew.

Seven years, crimes enough to sentence the lot of them to a collective fifteen year stretch at Chez Azkaban, three legitimate panty raids on three of Hogwarts houses, one near homicide, one night that they never spoke of again, and a final drunk trip to a griffin preserve on the coast of Uruguay so Sirius could teach them all to be cowboys, the set of them thought they would never be parted.

Then Halloween 1981.

Remus J Lupin about lost it on that night.

The pack's only cub disappeared.

It took him the better part of two weeks to track him down, mostly by virtue of having been caught in the aftermath of what happened to Frank and Alice, but by the time Remus tracked their cub down, he was hidden behind wards tied in part to specifically exclude him. Remus J Lupin did lose it then.

Two years of working as a shepherd brought him back to the field mentally, and from there he started ranging out. Gringotts still had some records of him during his Hogwarts years on file, and by virtue of those he was hired on as an additional security hand for an expedition to the Yucatan. Word had gotten back to England of a rediscovery of one of the last holds of the ancient Olmec Necromancers. Their work regarding exorcism and death wards was considered to be the height of the art before their culture's unknown implosion, so naturally the Goblins wanted a piece of it. At least they wanted a piece of it right up until they figured out why the Olmec had imploded. The expedition's target turned out to be a showing of George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead played at double speed.

Of their fifteen man crew they lost three Goblins, two men, and the security troll they took with them. Infectious inferi were not something to be joked about. The Americas were a hair's breadth from becoming one massive undead wasteland. Remus still had nightmares about an undead troll, and when he woke sweating to the deep bass of a troll calling out for brains, he never failed to pay homage to the Banded-Eye God for the divine inspiration the made the Olmec erect death containment wards around their cities.

When the expedition broke up, he decided to head north and see what he could do with his skills a bit closer to the colonies. After a month or two of dithering, he set up a small business separating rich Texans from their money as he led them through the mundane ruins around Central America. It worked out really well for him until his fourth trip when one of the berks he was leading around decided he knew better what snakes were venomous and not, and Remus had to pull out his knowledge of both healing spells and obliviation.

That lead to him running the fat yanks through a bit of training before he took them out, which drastically reduced how much emergency medical care he had to do, as well as increasing how much enjoyment he got out of his job. It turned out that having a bunch of college kids and their overweight parents run through an obstacle course while he sat with a tequila sunrise in one hand and a paintball gun in the other was a delightful way to spend a weekend, and the lectures he gave on the plants, animals, and locals that would all kill and eat one given the chance re-awakened his love for teaching.

Remus kept the business running for a while, and had a grand time doing it. Right up until he noticed the pattern. For every three trips he ran, one would just take his training course and ditch. A cursory search through his records and through the new-fangled internet traced the every third trip back to a company out of New York known for its aggressive patent litigation and hostile takeovers. He was being used to train corporate infiltrators in the basic fitness and stealth necessary to not die in hostile territory.

Inside of a day Remus's whole business disappeared, the compound he worked out of caught fire, and the jungle swallowed any and all mention that he had ever been there. Magic was handy for a new start.

The werewolf was set adrift again.

Instead of going back to the farm he had been a shepherd in, he decided to just go exploring, try and see if he could improve himself, just generally go walk about.

His feet led him first to the Motherland, where he got back into contact with his mother's family. Hope Lupin had died not too long before his pack had fallen apart in the fall of '81, and not too long after she left the world his father followed her. In the name of connecting back to his roots he went behind the edge of the iron curtain to see what he could find. His mum's family, it turned out, were caretakers for a score of high end dachas owned by members of the Soviet Premier's council. They were doing well for themselves.

Remus spent a month or so with them. He helped renovate a few of the homes and took general care of them while living the high life in the second homes of some of the most well off men in the entire Soviet Union.

At the direction of his Great aunt (twice removed) he pointed his feet toward Nepal and the Himalayas. She spoke of a man she once knew who had dedicated his life to inner discipline, and how if she knew anything about her great nephew, he needed this. Remus had never been one to ignore a little direction in his life, so away he went.

Tracking down the man his Aunt knew was a quest in and of itself. The Himalayas were dotted by small magical sanctuaries filled with people who had something to protect, wanted isolation, or just not to be found, and Remus J. Lupin visited nearly all of them. He walked the ten thousand steps to the Monastery of the Followers of the Empty Palm. He honed his skill with a blade at the side of a group of women dedicated to breaching the same monastery in the hopes of finding a suitable mate. At the entrance to the fortification known only as the Dark Redoubt, he quickly learned the finer points of disarming chemical explosives triggered by motion sensors as well as the intricacies of the thirteen layer bunker shield.

In over a year and a half of running around the Himalayas, all he ever came across was second hand mention of the man he had left Russia to find. Remus finally gave up and decided on a vacation to the island of heat and serenity known to mundane mythology as Shangri-La, only to find the man he sought living openly there as the only farmer of potatoes and maker of vodka.

He was a popular man.

Lupin stayed with him and studied the internal discipline of an empty mind and a unified soul. With the Mad Russian's help (though why he insisted the others call him 'the Mad Russian' Remus never knew) he finally overcame the last barrier between himself and the mind of the wolf within him.

It was the final unity he had been looking for without knowing. The day he sat cross legged in the soil of the mad Russian's potato farm with a bottle of vodka beside him meditating and making the final breakthrough to connect to his own lupine side was one of the most satisfying in his life.

It would figure that the bad in his life wasn't done though. He spent three glorious weeks on the Mad Russian's farm, working the land and getting trashed on the output of the man's still behind his house. Three glorious weeks that ended when he received word from the Motherland that Fenrir Greyback was moonlighting on a commission as a KGB agent. It seemed like his efforts under Stalin's reign were appreciated by the current faction looking to take advantage of the imminent fall of the Union.

Lupin caught a portkey back behind the now unsteady Iron Curtain and began working with small cells of freedom fighters trying to ensure their neighborhoods didn't suffer when the hammer and sickle was finally taken down from atop the Kremlin. The statute of secrecy got only the barest nod north of Belarus, so there were small cadres of weres like Greyback acting constantly as shock troops under the command of the KGB. Lupin spent his time showing people the hows and whys of fighting back against the rampant abuse of magic and power that was both happening and coming soon. He clashed directly with small secret police forces across the Urals as he worked to track down the man-beast who had affected his life so.

His efforts trained hundreds of men and saved a number of lives (not counting the troops whose lives his training would inevitably take) until 1989 when Remus began feeling that it may be too dangerous from him to stay. He left most of his earnings from over the years with his aunt and for the first time in seven years made his way back to the shores of the mage under the mountain.

Of course once he got back, Remus remembered why he left in the first place.

Legally and socially speaking, werewolves stood head and shoulders above pretty much only the undead in terms of desirability in Britain. He couldn't vote, he couldn't be legally employed in most fields, he couldn't hold a mastery, or depending on how strictly you interpreted the law, date anything both human and female.

So he did what he usually did in these unfriendly circumstances, he carved himself out a niche and kept going. The last remnant of his pack, Harry, was going to be passing through King's Cross station on September first, 1991. So with that time and place in mind he kept his head down and found work as a bodyguard. He put together a nice CV, and with a fond remembrance of the bastard that had betrayed them all, he went to a squib publicist the old dog once pursued and had the full work up done on himself. His time in Central America, the Himalayas, and around the soon to be former soviet republic had taught him a hell of a lot, and that all came out in the pictures and words he used to advertise his services. He spent a bit of time being in _quite_ the demand from nearly any witch or wizard with knowledge of the mundane world.

For a time his most consistent contract was with a lovely branch of the Lovegood family, more than a few of whom he met in his time going walkabout. They each had a wonderful and child-like madness about them that appealed to something in him, so he gleefully guarded the little girl and her father on their annual trips across the globe to find the ever illusive crumple horned snorkack.

September 1991 snuck up on him. He was on assignment, guarding and guiding and ingredient harvesting trip of a group of apothecaries looking for Tebo hide, when he got his first glance at a calendar in more than three months. His only saving grace at the time was that he stood on just the right side of the International Date Line to get back. With some slight storytelling and finally permission from his employers, he rushed back to England. By avoiding a few border agents and making an only mildly illegal run through the British Magical outreach office to the sovereign magical nation of Botswana, he managed to catch a portkey back to London and be in King's Cross by seven am local.

It may have been a few years, but he knew what his cub should look like. Despite his propensity to change hair color and nose length spontaneously as a baby, Harry should have a base form of his father's black rat's nest and his mother's green eyes. It was his first day of doing magic and He couldn't come up to a reason why Harry wouldn't be in his base form for at least a little while.

Tightening his favorite black long coat around himself, he stood amongst the mundanes running around their normal lives and he busied himself staring at every person passing through the wall between platforms nine and ten.

And he waited.

And he waited.

Aside from an excess of red heads muttering his cub's name, which seemed suspicious as all hell and probably warranted a follow-up, Remus didn't see anything. He missed Harry. He had used up his Botswana contingency plan (no WAY he'd be going back through there) and it had been a completely waste.

With an extended sigh (and a quick tracking charm on the big redhead - Molly Weasley maybe?) Remus gave a quick twist, apparating down to Folkestone, then across the channel and back to his clients.

The rest of the year passed as reasonably close to normal as it got for the lonely wolf man. He drove bandits from a party of Veela making their way through Moldova on the way to Bucharest. He was contracted to join a group of hit wizards breaking up a troll boxing ring held in the caverns beneath Eton College outside London. He monitored the Weasley's for a week in order to find out if they were a threat, and finally spent two months hauling camping gear behind his favorite mad man (excepting the Mad Russian, with whom he exchanged the odd owl) and his bubbly daughter. Remus missed Harry, but after years of utter failure to find him and losing the chance in September, he just couldn't bring himself to pull another stake-out.

It was a decent living, even if he would have preferred company and a marginally higher volume of plastic explosives.

Then, when he finally got back to his current rental place and got around to checking his mail, he found an invitation to tea from a name he hadn't seen since before the Halloween that had ended his life as he knew it. Amelia Bones. And it was signed as Head of the DMLE. She sure did well for herself after the betrayer and that night. The date was set for October 17th, and the only reason he had checked his mail in the first place was the fact that he was between contracts.

Why the hell not? They could catch up a bit, for old time's sake.

Like his Great Aunt was fond of saying, what's the worst that could happen?


	25. Chapter 23: Winter with Moony

Chapter 23:

"-So the guy walks up to his mum, _his bloody mum_, covered in his own excrement and still crying he says 'Mom, the stupid tour guide shot me in my arse and made me fall into the big bin of rubber snakes!' and she turns to him and slaps him upside the head!"

Harry was doubled over in laughter and at that point genuinely fell to the floor.

" 'Benjamin Fitzgerald Martin', she says, 'you watch your fucking language and change your pants right now, he told us that this could save our lives so you will refresh yourself and get back up on that rope swing this instant!'," Remus chuckled and looked off into the distance fondly, "That was the most fun I had ever had on that course. I mean I was mildly drunk at the time, I did mean to tag his arm, but really it was his fault for not using the loo beforehand like I told him to. Teenagers..."

Harry got to his knees, still trying to fend off laughter so he could get another breath, "By Ymir's bones! I can't believe you made a business where tourists PAID you to injure and humiliate them in the name of not dying in the jungle! Remus, can I be you when I grow up?"

The old wolf leaned over and mussed the boy's hair briefly, "I'll tell you now what I told your father when you were born, you can try, but in the end you're just not good looking enough."

Harry immediately morphed his face to match Remus', but with the careful addition of enough pigment to make him look like one of Knockturn Alley's ladies of the evening. Deep purple eye shadow met with bright red lipstick and slightly more rouge than would have been necessary to recreate a Weasley blush.

"What about now, sweet thing?"

It was enough to make the pair of them break down into laughter. It really had been a hell of a Christmas.

Amelia and Susan were in love with their presents, Hannah was still walking around with an odd gleam in her eye, Nym was handling her specially made piercings fondly, and Andi's gaze still flicked every few moments to the mass of chocolate on a cooling charm across the room from her. As he hugged Lord Stabbington to his side he could feel Luna's comforting presence at his side too.

Yep. Good Christmas.

"Lily and James, Lily and James... I know how much you want to know and how badly, but it's so hard to find a place to start."

"The beginning? How did they meet? What were their favorite foods and colors? I have their journals, though only dad was honest enough to call it a diary, but they only talk about what happened, and magic, and their lives, they don't talk about themselves, really. I mean who lists their favorite color and food all the time?"

"Hahaha! I'm surprised they didn't cover how they met in their journals, though maybe they wouldn't have. They met in our first class together. We all kinda rallied around Sirius, see his cousins were all still in school when he started, so there was a bit of a legitimate uproar around his sorting at the Slytherin table. It was so long ago, but I want to say we had charms first? Yes, charms, because the first day is the one where old Flitwick uses color changing charms to get all the firsties right into it."

"Dad's journal doesn't mention mum until about halfway through the year, and he kept going through overly poetic names, and there was even a page where he was writing her name in a bunch of different handwritings as 'Lily Potter'. It was really weird."

"That was James though, and that class was it for him. Flitwick gave us all the motion and incantation, as well as the bit of lecture, and then let us all loose. It was Sirius and James, Me and that hippogriff shit reject pile of," all of the ladies in the room harumphed at him, except Nym who looked like she was searching for a pen and paper, "Sorry, me and Peter. Your mum was with Alice, we had drawn all our own little lines by that time already, see? Now your dad and Sirius immediately start trying to change each other red and gold, Gryffindor pride, right? Now Sirius of course flubs the first spell he gets his grubby little hands on and manages to turn the entire room gold in an explosion that very nearly blinded your father. Lily of course takes exception to this, and marches right up to the little blighter and with the coldest voice I have ever heard to this very day demands the cad change her back. Now even then your da had the classic marauder spirit, he peeks over Sirius' shoulder and changes her hair back to bright red, even more vibrant than before, mind. As soon as he does it, her face began turning red too, now not part of the spell, just regular old anger burning through Sirius' charm work. She is about to explode and your dad just goes all cross eyed and says, 'Oh my goddess, it's an angel!' "

Harry just couldn't take it, he was in stitches again.

"So the whole classroom is utterly silent watching all of this go on, even Flitwick is up on his pile of mundane phone books (though where he got his Essex county phonebooks is beyond me) and we're all just staring at the three of them. Then your mum proved why she was worth her charms mastery and managed a pair of perfectly executed wordless stinging hexes to both James and Sirius' foreheads. Gave the pair of them welts so bad they looked like unicorns by lunch. But James caught the bug then and there, later that week he swore to the rest of us that he'd marry that girl or die trying, and you know what? We believed him."

" 'Oh my goddess'? Really? And she managed stinging hexes her first day?"

"Yep! I don't know what to tell you cub. For all his bluster and courage, your dad was a bit of an effeminate bloke. Though he'd be killing me for telling you. Your mum really wore the pants in the family, though it may have been because by the time they were married she just couldn't get enough of James in a kilt. The whole Scottish highlander thing really worked for her I guess, she used to get this gleam in her eye whenever she saw him in a kilt. Always unhealthy that was, at least as Sirius and I figured it. Though who it was unhealthy for..."

"I did _not_ need to know that, Moony."

"And I don't need to be drunk right now, cub. But we all have to make do, don't we?"

"Git."

"Child."

"I am a child!"

"Shut it pipsqueak."

"Oh I'll pipsqueak you, you good for nothing werewolf son of a-"

Their lunch conversation turned into yet another duel between them, and while normally Harry was skilled enough to keep up with him, it appeared that Remus Lupin with five celebratory New Year's mimosas in him was something of a savant.

Amelia activated the dueling ward she kept between the rest of the family and the part of the table that she made Harry and Remus sit on after the Second Battle of the Spilled Orange Juice, wherein Harry's favorite Weird Sisters tee shirt was stained after Moony's assertion that Rage Against the Machine was better, and Lupin was transfigured into a particularly fetching chinchilla.

She didn't think she had seen Harry ever quite this active, or ever smiling quite this much.

She and Andi finally managed to track down Remus just a bit after they sent all the little ones off to Hogwarts, and after sending two other unanswered invites to tea, just to get some face time with the werewolf mercenary, the finally met him in mid-October. They wanted Harry to have a living connection to his birth family as much as he did, but any parent would be worried about their kid associating with a man the CIA once referred to as 'either the greatest anti-Soviet asset America never had, or a dangerous nationalist vigilante'. Their fears didn't last much past the first biscuit though.

Lupin had shown up on the seventeenth with no problems, and he came in to their parlor dressed in an old patched up black jacket and jeans. His face had seen quite a few miles since either of them had seen him after Hogwarts, but it was undeniable that he still had a bit of his old swagger and charm.

It only took a few prying questions to figure out where his loyalty lied, and after Remus first broke the topic of possibly getting their help to find James and Lily's son again, they each had a feeling they found Harry his connection.

He took the news about Sirius and Peter like a bullet. His stoicism marred by the tears coursing silently down his face as he found out about his one-time brother spending the last twelve years in hell. They had done what they could for him though. James and Lily's will was enough proof for him, and the ladies were devastated to find out their hearts could break further when they saw how he almost lost his composure again seeing the handwriting of two of his greatest friends. James and Lily expressed their love for him and left him the apartment James had bought for them when they had first moved out after Hogwarts.

He came back the next day and got updated on the entire legal minefield that was releasing Sirius. They couldn't get the case heard on the floor of the Wizengamot without the Chief Warlock rescinding his order to seal. They couldn't go around him without passing through a veil of laws the bloody Goblins had been spending a year and a half trying to pierce. They couldn't bring their charges against the chief warlock to get a new one because he was Albus BLOODY Dumbledore, the man physically, magically, and philosophically couldn't lose a case he did not intend to lose. He even got Severus Snape out of Azkaban after the BLOODY BUGGERING DARK LORD DIED AND-

Tensions were high. Remus threatened to dip back into to his 'Mad Russian Supply', whatever that was.

They agreed to meet up every weekend from then until Christmas. Remus wanted to know more about his 'cub', and they wanted to know more about him. All joking aside, Her Majesty's Secret Intelligence Service had a file on him, a source of concern to any decent parent.

* * *

><p>Severus Snape looked down on his kingdom and wept.<p>

From his seat at the height of the noonday sun, he watched as his children, all of his furry niffler children, killed, maimed, and sacrificed in his name. Born of his flesh and blood, he created them all, from their wide spade like hands to their inquisitive and ever twitching noses.

From his blood he created the sea, from his bones the mountains, and from his flesh did he make the earth. He prepared all forms of nice small insects and lizards for his children, as well as only the finest in bushes of mint, sage, and lavender for them all. He spread the wealth of this sustenance across the world he made for them.

Then, when he made for his children a place to live and food to eat, he went back through the world and peppered every part of it with rubies, and sapphire, and diamonds, and gold. All of the most shiny and attractive things the mind could possibly conceive of did he make and spread for the glory of his children.

He gave of his life so they could live and be content, but such was not the way of things. The small hairy beings were not content to live an idyllic life of foraging for grub and the collection of glinting shininess. No.

His children began worshiping him, which he appreciated, but when they began their worship of him some stood among them and claimed to have spoken with him. They claimed to know his will. These nifflers directed others in the construction of great pyramids and ziggurats that they claimed would glorify him. They said that as he sacrificed of his body to create their world, so too should they sacrifice in honor of what he gave. They, in the great cycles of the calendar they devised, began massive ceremonies of live niffler sacrifice. They took of their small hordes of jewels and precious metals and threw away their favorites to present a sacrifice to him, and they began making war amongst themselves over the proper forms of worship to him.

Snape sat upon his throne in the noonday sun and despaired.

From his right, a form took shape from the mists, and so came to be his old friend, the Russian commando. Turning to his friend and his guide Snape lamented, "I gave them everything of myself, look on the glory I created for them! But they sacrifice their great bearded lizards in my name; they pull the hearts from their fellow's bodies in the hope that their sacrifice drives me to greater power! They kill the unwilling, and they steal and destroy those who would rather not give of the adorable shinies I left them in the world! What am I to do when my children turn on each other so? I wished only to forge for them a world of peace, that they may live, and love, and discover pretty baubles in the depths of the earth I made for them?"

The battle hardened Russian looked on his charge, and seeing his desperation said, "Look at your children. Your work is not enough. Will never be enough. Thy have own minds, they have own will to follow. If sacrifice bothers you, do something. Show little ones error of their way. See here," the Russian said, directing Snape's attention to an island ruled by a mad priest, "Look at priest. He makes ready the next sacrifice he will make, he raise boy here to one day die. He does not see error in his ways, he never will. You may do as you have done, nothing. Or maybe you act. Maybe you show old priest error of his way, no? Is for you to decide, but think on it."

And so Severus Snape did. He looked on all of the land and sea he had made for his children. He looked into their dens and tunnels and he looked into the highest reaches of the structures they had made. Then, after much contemplation, he acted.

* * *

><p>"You ever thought about becoming an animagus like your folks?"<p>

"Wait, Lily was an animagus? My birth-mum was also one? Well poo now I _have _to."

"Yeah, now this one I know why she never wrote down. I bet it was the same thing with your dad, Sirius, and," it was tough for the man, but he managed to choke out the name without cursing, "Petigrew."

"Marauder's honor?"

"Something like that. Looking back, we really were kinda like a street gang. I mean we had all of these secrets of our own, we had rivals we fought constantly, hell, we all lived out of the same apartment block for a while, at least until they went into hiding. We really should have been punished for a lot of the stuff we used to do, but it was war time."

"What do you mean?"

"Well setting aside what I now recognize would have been sexual harassment with the panty raids, we really used to go hard on those Slytherins. In our defense their parents were more often than not actively attempting to kill ours, but still. Take Snape, yeah?"

"I'd been meaning to ask about him..."

"Yeah, so to get the weirdness out of the way, he used to really have a thing for your mum," retching, "yeah, I know. Anyway, James _hated_ that. So naturally we backed up our man and we spent a LOT of time pranking him. The issue was we were all pranksters, so we often went off on our own and did things. I'm sure you know the trouble of combining unknown or poorly researched effects though, and that's most of what pranking is. So about halfway through fifth year, Snape did something or other, privately called your dad a mudblood lover or something, and so we all set out on him.

I pulled my notes together and worked out a way to use a potion to ink color changing runes on a parchment in such a way that if I could get them into contact with skin they would constantly change a person's hair color until that fellow found and disabled the runes. Your dad knew that Snape like to billow his cloak, I'm sure you know the way, so he set about _his_ notes and made a custom charm designed to mimic all the symptoms of uncontrollable gas, as in butt cheeks flapping, air rushing out, the whole thing, but only to Snape, no one else could see, hear, or feel it. Sirius, ever the consummate six year old, brewed himself up a potion that _actually_ induced uncontrollable gas. Now to this day I don't know how he did it, but using a bit of the weird stuff they put in time turners, he actually managed to make an everlasting elixir out of the brew."

"Gods above."

Remus smiled widely, "Oh yes, you can see where this is going now. So by accident we all hit him the same day. Sirius switched the contents of a vial with his morning pumpkin juice, James nailed him just after our morning transfiguration, and I managed to slip him the parchment during a manufactured altercation just after lunch. Now we didn't see him for the rest of the day. The next day he doesn't come down to breakfast, he misses potions, and no one sees him for lunch. Dinner though.

We finally saw him at dinner and by the Banded Eyed God, did we mess him up. James' work interacted with the elixir to come to a weird form of permanence, Sirius' complemented and changed James', and mine? Well. You ever wonder why his hair looks so damn greasy _all_ the time? The contact potion I used for the runes mixed with Sirius' handiwork, and," _hehehe_, "Well, there's no easy way to say it," Remus' story was now actively impeded by his mile wide grin, "He began to fart from his hair. Uncontrollably."

Harry had to close his eyes and try to find his center because if he didn't in a big goddamn hurry he might break a rib from laughing. Remus was openly giggling like a schoolgirl, to the point where he couldn't get another word out. By sheer happenstance, Andi walked by the room the two were in and recognized their dire straits. A few flicks of her wand and the two were under an emotion suppressant designed for use with accidents involving cheering charms. A nod and four thumbs up later, she left on her way.

In a perfect deadpan Harry continued, "So what ended up happening?"

"Well, the everlasting elixir is called that for a reason. It doesn't go away, but thankfully for Snape it mutated when it met with James' charms. He doesn't produce any odor, thanks be, but in the style of James' charm, he constantly feels like he is undergoing the effects of the same. No one else sees or feels it other than the wind, but to his ears and body, he is constantly farting. Constantly. It's why the cape billows. And he began greasing his hair so much because if he let it go, his hair would constantly stand up and wave from the amount of air passing through it. To this very day he continues to fart from his scalp."

"Well."

"Yeah."

"You really should be in jail."

"There is a pretty good reason why the time dust or whatever it is is so rigorously controlled."

"But..."

"Yeah."

...

...

"In our defense, he had tried to severely injure if not murder us on multiple occasions. Really it's kind of Dumbledore's fault for letting a bunch of armed teenagers go so far."

"I want to laugh but I can't feel any amusement. I'm kinda glad because I think I may die from this when the charm breaks."

"Keep Andi around then."

"Good plan. Since we can't feel anything, wanna go unnerve the girls by watching cartoons without emotions?"

With tears of pride breaking through the block placed on him, Remus put a hand on Harry's shoulder, "Yes cub, yes I do."

* * *

><p>As Harry and his friends and Family all line up in front of the horrendous crimson of the Hogwarts express, eyes watered for a reason beyond the normal wizarding lack of design sense.<p>

Remus was the best Christmas present anyone could have possibly gotten a twelve year old multi-millionaire. Harry actively didn't want to go back to school, and not just because while everyone had been having fun there was still some kind of murder beast on the prowl, the castle was a huge and inquisitive pervert, and he would have to watch Ron Weasley eat.

Amelia and Andi had grown pretty fond of the old wolf themselves, setting aside how happy his stories and dueling skill made Harry, he was a decent and well-traveled fellow on his own. Everyone had separately extracted promises from the man that he would stick around, at least until they could spend more time together during the summer. The skills he had picked up when he went walkabout could be applied to almost everyone's interests. Frankly the man was like a magical MacGyver, which given his mild propensity towards violence and major propensity towards mayhem made him a terrifying man and an awesome uncle.

No one had seen Luna yet, but Neville and Dowager Longbottom met them on just the other side of the gate. A bit deeper inside the magical station they had found Hermione sitting atop her trunk with a dainty air and a book in hand. No one could spot Luna, but it was recognized that she would reappear in her own unique way soon enough.

Hugs were spread around, and tears were had. Harry had never felt closer to his family, Amelia or his birth parents. It was hard to let go when you have something like that. He just had his first real Christmas, and yeah, maybe blowing the rough equivalent of twenty thousand galleons on a Christmas wasn't a great idea, but he'd be damned if it wasn't one of the finest times he had ever had in his entire life. Though given some of his memories that bar wasn't super high to start out with.

Before he got onto the train, Remus took him aside and leaned next to his ear, "_Hinin-Yaku Ryuu Bu_, remember it kiddo," and then leaning back out he gave his cub one last hug, "You're an amazing kid, you've done me proud, and I know with absolute certainty that James and Lils would feel the same. Just keep it up."

Harry smiled like only metamorph could, and returned the hug with vigor, "Thanks Moony."

Remus ruffled the young Punk's hair a bit, and with a loving smile at Amelia and Andi, Harry leapt up onto the train and made his way to the friend's compartment. By the time he sat down he had processed all that the old were had told him, and his brain was picking over the first thing.

"_Hinin-Yaku Ryuu Bu... Hinin-Yaku Ryuu Bu... _I thinks it's an incantation, but I have no idea what, it doesn't sound like it's from any romantic or western tradition..."

Susan chimed in, saying, "What're you mumbling about?"

"It's something Remus told me just before he let me go on to the train, he said _Hinin-Yaku Ryuu Bu_, and he told me to remember it, like it's supposed to mean something to me. I mean it sounds like an incantation, but what could it be?"

Nym and Hannah perked up into the discussion, while Neville continued paging through the latest quibbler, mild grin firmly entrenched on his face.

"Well it's not latin... I'd say we just try it out on something, but this _is_ Remus we're talking about. Moony of the marauders."

"I don't know," Hannah began, "He was always nice to us, i don't think he would just give Harry an unknown spell that could hurt any of us. He'd have to know we'd try it, or at least that Harry and Nym over here would."

Nym looked hurt, but Harry nodded along, "Well, to Tartarus with it, _Hinin Yaku Ryuu Bu_!"

With a flick Harry cast the unknown spell at the floor of the compartment near the door, figuring it would do the least damage there. The spell cast as just a dim white light that impacted the ground and seemed to make the floor shine slightly.

"Well that's kind of a downer, he gave you a floor polishing spell?" Nym said with disbelief in her voice, "I thought better of the Marauders."

As if on cue the door was flung open and Draco Malfoy took a step into the compartment, his mouth open and invariably set on making an ass of himself. Unfortunately for him, all he got out was "Pott- EEEEIEIEE!" as his first step landed flat in the middle of the shining region of the floor.

Malfoy flung out his arms to try and stop himself, be he had entered with too much vigor for anything to work. In a move that would make a meth addicted quintaped seem graceful, the boy flopped back and impacted the floor directly with his head, knocking himself clean out. Crabbe and Goyle stepped in and with a glance at one another, Crabbe tugged on his forelocks saying, "Pardon guv'nors."

He and Goyle each grabbed a leg and dragged their nominal leader out into the hall and parts beyond.

As soon as they were clear Luna popped up in the doorway, her trunk shuffling on tiny animated legs behind her.

"Harry, why did you knock Malfoy out with the Japanese combination lube/contraception charm?"


	26. Chapter 24: There and Back Again

Chapter 24:

The ride to Hogwarts was its usual fun, though the Bank of Dewey, Cheatham, and Lovegood did finally lose to the combined corporate interest of the Librarian Excellence Fund and Madame Bonesalot's Collected Corporate Entity. The ride did bring the mystery and danger of Hogwarts back into focus for Harry.

His stalkers were back, with a vengeance.

Strawberry/vanilla and vinegar. The smell he found after he was teasing Nym with Hagrid's canine pal. It was all over the hallway in the train. Harry wasn't an expert, he didn't spend enough time really smelling things he guessed, but it was fresh. They had just been outside the compartment.

Halfway through the train trip, on the bi-annual mid-game bathroom run, the smell was there again, more fresh if anything. Whoever was stalking him (and harry was pretty sure it was him) had been right outside the door up until a moment before they opened it. The hallways were filled with kids though, laughing, pranking, generally horsing around as Andi would have put it. A stalker would be immediately lost in the mess, and the scent faded to almost nothing just a few feet from the door, replaced by sweat and terrifying teenager pheromones.

As they exited the bathroom Harry caught a whiff again, but given the almost constant line for the loo, he couldn't pin it down to a person. It was one of the frustrating things about changing one's body without the instinct that would have come from being an animagus. To Harry and Nym both it was just sensory input without context. They could use it, but they lacked any kind of guiding instinct as to what to do with the information. It was the reason why they hadn't made almost any real progress on flight, despite being both capable of very roughly mimicking bird physiology. Flight, and using a bloodhound like nose change, both relied on millennia of bred in instinct and at least a few years of basic teaching from a parent of the same species, and it wasn't like there were books on it. He and his delightful friend were likely the first in centuries to push their power so far, if not the first overall, any other magic type who made an animal change of the same magnitude did so by channeling the animal within and in doing so was granted the instincts of the same.

It wasn't like Harry could do much about it anyway. He was still gleefully hiding behind whatever terrifying blood wards had been erected around him as a child, the result of which was much like a mild confundus on the general public. Anyone with ill will, reporters trying to take advantage of him, businesses looking to have him endorse their product, the more amorous crowd looking for a teenage celebrity to corrupt, all those people could only see him as Harry Bones, no name son of the head of the DMLE. Despite this, the boy who lived and Harry Bones both had a number of well-meaning groupies who followed him around on occasion. They weren't good at it, given that he changed his face every few minutes in the halls (usually to whoever the last Ravenclaw he passed was), but one more stalker wasn't much.

Strawberry/vanilla and vinegar were different though. They made the hair on the back of his neck stand up. Involuntarily that was, that hair frequently stood up when Harry felt like a mohawk colored like the Union Jack was more his style. The scent made the augury voices in his wand grumble. He was uneasy. But like so many of his other issues, there just wasn't much for it. Yet anyway. He'd give it a week.

* * *

><p>The Friends grabbed a coach up to the castle from Hogsmeade station, thanking whoever was listening for space expansion charms along the way. As they passed through the entrance hall a high warbling filled the air, and in a flash of fire Hedwig appeared carrying the sorting hat.<p>

"Hedwig!" cried Harry, "What have you been up to, you're not still drinking are you?"

The bird dropped the hat into Harry's hands and perched itself on his shoulder, managing to somehow appear bashful.

"Well one or two won't kill you, just for New Years I suppose."

Hedwig bobbed her head side to side in a kind of avian shrug.

Harry sighed deeply, "I don't want to know, Hed."

She delivered a somewhat indignant squawk, and then looked sheepish as she trilled off gently.

"You did what? Just what in the nine hells is a 'Garden Gnome Ultimate Fighting Ring?"

It started off weird, and now everyone including the thousand year old sorting hat were intrigued by where this was heading. A series of trills, whistles and beak snaps evidently told Harry the story, and his open mouth and blank expression said a lot to the group.

"Next time I don't care if bunch of bowtruckles refuse to let you stay in their tree, you're not allowed to start up an underground ultimate fighting ring!" Hedwig started to open her mouth, as if to sing further, "No! I'll be having none of it, the drinking I can handle, even if I'm a little jealous, the centaurian ale party was a funny story after all, and hanging out with unicorns in that Veela community without me seemed fun and stuff, but I'm putting my foot down! Hedwig Anserine Octavius Potter,"

Tonks managed a stage whisper to everyone else, "Oooh, the _full_ name."

"You are forbidden from starting any form of underground Ultimate Fighting League!"

A brief lilting trill, then, "That includes any form of cage match, and you know what? I'm just going to straight forbid you from setting up any form of organized sporting event without consulting me."

The phoenix just seemed to wilt in front of them on Harry's shoulder.

"Nope, I'm not backing down because you're cute. I don't care," he said as he crossed his arms and looked away.

There was a beat of silence, before the bird in trouble perked up a bit and rubbed her cheek against Harry's. She poked him gently with her beak a few times before he gave a gentle sigh and turned back, "Ugh, _fine_, I won't ask you to disband your current league. But you better not be taking advantage of them!"

A twelve year old shaking a finger at an immortal fire bird on his shoulder in a scolding manner was an image that would rest with the friends until their dying days. Mostly by virtue of having been repeated numerous times over the rest of their lives.

The Sorting Hat managed to find its way into Luna's arms during the exchange, and it shook silently with mirth as the scene played out. It's shaking got more and more violent until it just broke out cackling in laughter.

"Oh sweet Godric's gonads, this is why I need to get out of ole' Fumbledore's office more. I miss moments like these! Hahahahahaha!"

Luna looked down at the headwear in her arms, "It does happen to us a lot more often than you would think."

The hat continued chuckling for a moment before standing bolt upright. Or well, you know, whatever bolt upright passes for amongst head based dressings.

"Crap, any of you kids got the time?"

A number of hands went to watches, but before anyone could respond the hat kept going, "Doesn't matter, I'm needed elsewhere. We gotta talk tomorrow, Hedwig?"

The bird popped over to Luna's arms, snatching the hat from her hands and fire-flashing away.

There was another beat of silence among the friends where they stood in the entrance hall, before Harry finally sighed for what felt like the umpteenth time that night and headed in to the Great Hall muttering what sounded like, "You can't make this stuff up, stupid bird."

* * *

><p>The January third welcome back feast would be one for the history books, and for once not because of point loss, or the semi-random babbling of their headmaster. It would go down in history books as one of the quietest feasts to take place in the halls of Hogwarts, including the meals during war time.<p>

There were a number of things it could have been caused by. Dumbledore's casual dismissal of anything resembling fashion sense (I mean who wears deep purple robes with enchanted bear cubs playing a game of hide and seek with a unicorn before Labor day. Or after Labor Day. Just ever, really.) was an option. McGonagall's normally composed face of general censure and disapproval being replaced with an open mouth and shock filled eyes may have been it. Madame Pomphrey attempting healing magic on her eyes at the dinner table, or even Professor Trelawney looking up the staff table and then back to her cup with a suspicious expression were all things that could have drawn attention.

It wasn't that though.

Professor, Master of the Dark Arts and Potions, and generally acknowledged vampire stereotype, Severus Snape was actually the reason why nary a word was uttered.

In place of the dour expression that some said he had been born with, the man wore a kindly and wide smile. Where before he had looked like he shopped at a store that tailored specifically to the undead with an overdeveloped sense of the dramatic, he now wore robes that gave his employer a serious run for his money, as in floor to neck tie dye. Finally the hair that many students claimed contained the ur-grease, the grease from which all others derived, the primordial grease as it were, Severus Snape's hair waved back and forth gently in an unseen breeze, sticking out at all angles in what was unmistakably an afro.

Mid-way through the meal, Harry made tentative eye contact with the man and when his face didn't cloud over with a werewolf rage, Harry gave him a small wave. The resulting widened smile and demonstrative wave back made almost the whole of Gryffindor visibly flinch and drove a few badgers to nearly lose their meals. The only times most of the student population had ever seen a smile beneath the potions master's elongated nose was after someone had managed to injure themselves or when they were about to lose points by the score. In his time he had driven legions of students to tears and what's more, had driven nearly a generation out of the potions profession. By virtue of his 'professionalism', nearly all of the last half dozen or so classes of healers and aurors turned out to be ninety percent or more Slytherin.

And that man just smiled and waved at the son of his arch nemesis, Harry Potter.

* * *

><p>"Okay, spill," Nym punctuated her gentle request with a not so gentle poke to the sternum.<p>

Behind her stood Susan, Hannah, and Hermione, while Neville and Luna took places more or less calmly behind him on a stuffy couch in the Hufflepuff common room.

"Okay, do you want the short version, the long version, or plausible deniability? I'm good for all of the above."

Neville managed to interject, "Good in a very broad sense," as he continued on what appeared to be an upside down crossword in the Quibbler.

Harry grimaced, and Nym poked him again, "You told me you'd take care of it, and last we all saw Snape had a mental breakdown of some kind and passed out, now he's back and looking like some kind of Rainbow powered... well.. some kind of rainbow powered nice guy."

Her tone dripped disgust, with just a soupçon of confusion. Harry sat down happily between his two friends and said, "I didn't hear a selection in there, because this choice is important."

Nym turned to look at the girls behind her, exchanging significant glances with them like only members of the finer sex can. Turning back to the boy who was arguably her favorite juvenile delinquent she said, "Long. We may as well just get this out of the way."

Harry smiled. He had been hoping to give out his long explanation.

"Let's get two things out of the way first, you all know how much I love those books I bought about the magical side of the Burning Man event?" a series of nods answered him, "Good, and you all know what LSD is?" more nods, though Neville's as more hesitant than the rest, "Good. Well the magical side of the Burning Man event is somewhat organized by a council of mages that ensure the statute of secrecy gets upheld despite Goblins, centaurs, merpeople, and the odd house elf mixing with the mundanes there. These shamans of Burning Man occasionally add to their number, and when they do the prospective shaman must undergo a rite of induction. Through the combination of a number of powerful mundane and magical hallucinogens, as well as some relatively light ritual work, the person trying to become a shaman is put into a magical coma where they are able to experience every previous burning man event from the perspectives of the shaman running it. Their book contains this rite."

Hermione was biting her lip, and had her hands clasped in front of her mouth, "You didn't!" she indignantly squeaked.

"No, I didn't," a sigh of relief, "not that exact ritual anyway," the poor girl bounced right back into tension, "I modified a few parts of the ritual to change the experience, and being that I have never been to burning man that part wouldn't have translated well anyway. No, what I did was a bit cleverer, I think. I took the ritual, and instead of tuning it to the memories of an event, I tuned the ritual specifically to the Other. I placed the hallucinations inside Snape's mind, and I made each of them reference the opposite of his mind. What we all saw before we left was the first day of a magical coma that he fell into. Inside that coma Snape was placed through probably a huge number of terrifying, surreal, and definitely Other scenarios, as a kind of spiritual journey. His mind was a square peg that an Nth dimensional being bent sideways and fit into a round hole. For the entire break his mind was exposed constantly to things outside of its knowledge and understanding. Snape met Not Snape, like matter meeting anti-matter, and as a result his mind as we knew it broke."

Nym still stood imposingly in front of him, but her finger drooped at the end of her arm, and her mouth opened and closed several times. It was like she had a lot of thoughts and couldn't seem to say any of them.

"Now, I know what you're thinking. 'Harry, don't play god.' 'Harry, you're a twelve year old idiot, you shouldn't poison your teachers with a ritual you inexpertly modified on your own.' 'Harry, how did you order a number of frankly dangerous hallucinogens from overseas without getting caught by mum and the police.' Well, first of all I mostly know what I'm doing, and second, he was never really in danger. What I did was force him to spend a month dealing with everything outside of his understanding and the experience looks like it broke his bitter fragile mind and re-shaped him into something new."

Hermione was rapidly turning red, her hands clenching into fists in front of her, "Harry James Bones! That is so illegal, you... you.. you criminal! I should report you to the police! And... and you should be expelled! From the country! He was a professor!"

"Hermione, do you know why I did what I did? Do you understand why we didn't go to my mum when we found out that Snape had been sabotaging me in the most dangerous way possible, and when he hurt Nym? Hermione, Severus Snape is a Death Eater. He was a servant of the Dark Lord Voldemort when he was still up and about and killing people like Susan, Neville, and I's parents, or Nym's dad. Snape was a part of that, and he took part in all of that, and in the face of all of it, Dumbledore spoke up for him and got him off for any and all crime he committed. Do you really think the head of the wizengamot and the head of the international confederation of wizards would have any trouble using his power to get that same guy off for the comparatively small offense of sabotaging a few kids so they would hurt themselves?"

The girl seemed to shrink in on herself. Harry never raised his voice or even spoke out of turn, but his words somehow stung worse for it.

"But he's a professor..."

"And now, if the fact that he smiled at me is any indication, he may be a better one. Besides, Luna's been hit with a ritual just a step below what I put him through, and she's awesome," he said, indicating the girl to his left, "So it's not like it's a huge deal. Snape's tiny pureblood mind just couldn't take something like that."

"What do you mean Luna has been through something like that!" the words seemed to explode from Hannah, who hadn't looked too concerned for their formerly greasy teacher, but was now very concerned for their currently bubble friend.

"It was my eye opening ceremony. It's a Lovegood clan tradition. At the age of ten we all are put through a ritual kinda like what Harry did to our bloody arse of a potions professor. Daddy said it's really similar to what the mundane call LSD. But their thing wears off after a while, and it's a lot more powerful. The ritual I did is permanent, and through it I can see a lot more of magic. People think I'm a little off, but I can just see more than them. The world is filled with these little confluences of energy, every one of us is just a blip. I can see the ley lines running across the ground sometimes, and I can see all kinds of magic flocking to them like moths around a candle. It's cool!" she said with a smile bright on her face.

"It's not a bad euphemism," Harry said, bringing the conversation back around, "I opened Snape's eyes. Maybe a hair too much if he continues to wear robes like that, but all the same."

Nym stared through the wall, like she was looking at the black lake in the distance, and after a moment nodded to herself. Refocusing on the boy in front of her she poked him once, one more time, and then three times in a row, "Well you don't do things by half. And you're dumb and you could have gotten caught and then you'd be in deep trouble. But thank you. It's both scary and nice to see what you would do for me."

"I'll do anything for my friends," came Harry's response from behind an easy smile.

* * *

><p>Harry woke up early the next day, as was his custom. He wanted to get reacquainted with his friends in the kitchens and see how their breaks were. The elves usually had a bit of a dreary time over the winter hols, most students went home and that left them with nothing to do.<p>

When he came down to meet them they were quick to inform him that this yule had been different. Evidently the Weasley twins had been kept back at hoggy old Hogwarts, and they had made their usual trouble. Of all of the students in the school the twins were probably one of the elves' favorites, their messes were the biggest and usually the most fun to clean up. A few snowball fights, a few dungbombs, and what appeared to be a small temporary swamp trap outside the Slytherin common room had been this year's damage, and the elves found that swamp water made the most amazing stains on your average tapestry.

Ron Weasley had also been at the castle for break with his goons Thomas and Finnegan, and they had made their own mass of trouble. From what Drip and Drop were able to gather from the professors, the three of them had tried to brew polyjuice potion of all things to try and find out if Malfoy was the 'Heir of Slytherin' from earlier in the year. Weasley had run across it during a detention in the library, and the trio were able to sweet talk Professor Lockhart into a pass to get the book from the restricted section. Their plan had evidently been one of those thousand monkeys accidentally writing Shakespeare moments, because in their attempt to brew the potion they showed their true level of competence.

One mistake in a dangerous potion like polyjuice can be fatal. Two can be a disaster, and three a catastrophe. As near as Dumbledore could tell, the boys had made no less than thirteen small errors in their process, resulting in an acid that ate through their cauldron and spilled onto a wall in Gryffindor tower. One ten foot wide segment of the wall had been eaten through for a whole four stories, and the common room had taken a surprising amount of rain and snow damage.

The damage was repaired and the elves were happy for the extra work during the normally dull holiday season, but they were about the only people who were.

As Harry was putting on an apron to lend a hand to the morning's pancakes, Hedwig flamed in and deposited the sorting hat on his head.

"Valentino the Hat! My Man! How have you been?"

"Eh, you know how it goes, you fiddle around in the minds of a few dozen pre-teens, you drink, you vomit fibre on the headmaster's desk, the usual."

"You and I have different usuals."

"..."

"Okay, not _that_ different all things considered, but still. Anyway, not that I mind, but why're you down here?"

Harry began prepping a fifty gallon drum of batter as the hat started in on his real reason, "Hogwarts has been, I guess for lack of a better term, exploring itself over the break. It should be able to detect literally any piece of sacrifice or blood based magic inside itself, courtesy of about five hundred years of headmasters concerned with the subject. It also should be able to sense any and all creatures inside itself for the same reason. Our favorite building looked through itself sub-basement dungeon to tower, and it found nothing significant."

Harry readied the mixer, a one ton magical rotation engine capable of mixing a fifty gallon drum of batter, and said, "Nothing?"

"Well, a few dozen blood quills from lawyer's kids and a few purebloods, a Goblin sacrificial dagger from one of the student hiding his heritage, and a few small odds and ends like voodoo dolls and heritage potions on the boil. Nothing of any real significance. This means one of two things. Either the thing causing our troubles is tied into the wards some way, which given five hundred years of meddling headmasters means it could be anything, or the person doing this left over the break. That still leaves you something like nine hundred and fifty or so people, but it's better than nothing."

Harry flicked an imperturbable charm onto the hat as he revved the mixer into the batter. When it was mixed he removed his goggles and wiped a hand across his mouth to reveal it again from the splatter he and the elves next to him had spread, "We still have so little to go on. Are we sure Hogwarts can't find anything else?"

"Harry, the castle may be a terrifying perverted building filled with teenage hormones and incredibly obsessed with bodily functions, but it does love all of its children. It's working on this constantly."

"It must be nice being connected to the castle and also not being a humanoid. Hogwarts's questions have been getting weird lately."

"Oh yeah! That reminds me, Hogwarts figured out how to speak to an individual through a set of armor, and it wanted me to ask..."

* * *

><p>Hermione Granger woke gently as her alarm charm played a small buzz for her ears only. It had been one of the first spells she had researched and mastered on her own, after all, classes were useless if you didn't attend and pay attention. She rose and with a brief stretch skyward, she went to perform her morning ablutions.<p>

Most magicals used a charm on their mouths. It had been invented by Bertford the Elder in the year 1342 because of the terrible breath his wife and children had in the morning. Hermione was more than a little amused to note he never used it himself because, as history recorded his words, "Fresh breath is for lesser beings, like red-heads and the Celts." It was a small comfort to know that people were terrible no matter when you were. As far as teeth were concerned Hermione was raised proudly by dentists. She brushed, she flossed, and she doubled checked her gums every morning.

Dressing in her freshly laundered and pressed uniform (and what magic did that for them every other day, she wondered), Hermione moved through the small halls of the lady's dormitories to the common room. She met her friends here every morning before they all went to breakfast. Well, most of her friends. Everyone save Harry Bones. Or Potter.

It was hard not to think of him as Potter.

Harry Potter was a larger than life figure. She had been reading about him for almost a year before she had actually met him. He was in a large number of books, ranging from history to a number that chronicled his adventures in the fight against clans of vampires, giants, and in one case a herd of dragons.

Harry Bones, as he insisted, was an incredibly frustrating male with what appeared to be mild sociopathic tendencies and too much information for any eleven year old to handle. He had never fought vampires, though upon her questioning he did say 'yet', and in the same vein he had never bargained for the lives of orphans with a collection of Sphinxes or done battle with something called a 'Heliopath'. He was just some boy. A kind of annoying one at that. And he had all those books! _Old_ books. Old books filled with such wonderful information! The charms, and the transfigurations! And she saw one of his once that talked about mind magic! What was that! She wanted to know! But the stupid dumb foolish boy got all touchy about it after she insisted he put them in the library. It was information! It wanted to be free!

But she was losing the plot here. Breakfast. Whenever she thought about that boy she always went off on a tangent. But whatever. They had to track him down and head to breakfast. He always woke early and helped the elves in the kitchen. She hadn't seen them before, but it was magic, and she unfortunately had other things to read about first. Falling in with her other friends, they all trooped out of the common room to try for the daily search for Harry.

It was easy that morning though, they ran into Harry talking to a suit of armor just down the hall from the common room. Suits of armor didn't usually talk back, but then she had gotten lost heading to the loo the week before and happened onto a room with a miniature house in it populated by what appeared to be geckos. Out of politeness she had knocked on the door, to inquire after what was going on exactly, but she was fairly certain the lizard had told her that they already had one thanks and slammed the door on her finger. It caused her pain, but Hermione gave up on understanding Hogwarts.

"-STILL DON'T UNDERSTAND, WHY WOULD YOU CALL SOMEONE AN 'ASS HOLE'? YOU MEATLINGS HAVE BEEN USING THAT WORD FOR A NUMBER OF YEARS, PARTICULARLY THOSE FROM WALES. IT'S JUST A PART OF YOUR MEAT BODY, SO WHY?"

"Hmmm... Okay, that's a tough one... Okay, I got it. How do you feel about having a really dusty and dirty hall? Like if someone hadn't cleaned it in forever?"

"UNPLEASANT. IT WOULD BE DIRTY. UNDESIRABLE."

"Right, now if there was one part of you, say the sixth floor on the east side, that was ALWAYS like that. It was just always dirty. Or say all of the dirt in you accumulated there, you would begin to associate it specifically with that undesirable feeling, yeah?"

"I UNDERSTAND YOU, MEATLING."

"Okay, so if you met someone who you felt was undesirable, you might associate them with the east side of the sixth floor. Eventually you might begin to describe things you found unpleasant as being like the sixth floor east side. For humans, our butts are a similarly dirty place. When we meet an undesirable, we call them after a place we all associate with undesirable and unclean things. It's... what's the word... A pejorative! That's it."

"MY THANKS, MEAT CHILD. I TREASURE OUR CONVERSATIONS SO."

"Well they are interesting..."

"Harry?" Hermione began. She honestly didn't know how to continue or finish, so beginning was all she had left.

"Oh! Hey! Didn't see you guys there, I was headed back to the common room when Francis over here stopped me."

Hermione looked at her other friends around her. The prevailing opinion seemed to be that breakfast was getting cold, so it was up to her to ask, "Francis?"

"Yeah," he responded with a smile, "Most of the suits of armor are named from who they were stolen from."

There it was, that stupid lopsided grin on his face, the one that told her he knew something she didn't, and he'd tell her, but she needed to be the one to ask the dumb question to get her precious information.

Combining a sigh and a question, she put a hand to her forehead and closed her eyes saying, "Stolen?"

"Yup!," came the bright response, "The Hogwarts board of directors elected a man you would consider to be much like a super villain headmaster for a period of time in the 1590s. He personally stole most of the suits of armor around the school from the personal armories of famous people and explorers, leaving them here as a mark of his tenure. Francis here was stolen from the personal armory of Sir Francis Drake in... What was it?"

"1589, MEATLINGS."

"1589, right, see? It not talked about in _Hogwarts A History_ because the governors try to forget that part of our beloved learning institution's history."

She felt indignant in the extreme. A book lying by omission! The very idea!

"Well how do you know that then!?"

"You're not going to like hearing this, but all modern public editions of Hogwarts A History are pretty heavily abridged. The good editions came out in the late 1700s. Really the only way to find a complete history these days is for your family to have purchased a self-updating and archiving copy something like three hundred years ago. Occasionally you can find one of them floating through one of the second hand shops in Diagon, but they get snatched up pretty quick."

It was too early for this. Hermione was done with this day, and it was hardly Nine AM. She felt a headache coming on that would rate a 6.5 on her Harry Bones scale of headache awareness. Thankfully the boy was not unaware of her distress.

"I can loan you my copy if you'd like."

Pressing knuckles firmly against her head where she felt the headache coming on she said, "Thank you Harry, that would be very nice.


	27. Chapter 25: Hogwarts Normal

Chapter 25: Hogwarts Normal

The first day back may have been a doozy, but... well actually the second wasn't too much better. Or the third. Hogwarts was a terrifying place if you looked at it from a normal perspective.

Hundreds of students, teenagers and below, all walked the halls on a daily basis with deadly weapons. A poorly executed transfiguration of a matchstick into a needle, if pointed the wrong way, could result in brain hemorrhage and near instant death. A man waving the end of his wand a bit too much at the end of _tarantallegra_ could shake another's heart to the point of bursting, and the ability of a potion to blow up, burn out, vaporize, tenderize, murderize, circumcise and create self-aware fungi is almost not worth mentioning. Add in hormones, rivalries, sporting events, and the statistical certainty of the odd sociopath making his or her way about the place and it was an honest to gods wonder of the modern world that there were as many living magic wielders in the world as there were.

Hogwarts went above and beyond in supplying the wizards of the English language over at Oxford a new definition of normal. In the face of all of that, it really wasn't surprising that in the weeks after everyone got back from yule the friends all began to notice a pair of faces trailing them, or rather Harry.

Everyone got back to their classes, library readings, transfiguration experiments, mild enchantments, and general Tom Foolery. It was Hogwarts normal, magic normal. What can you do?

* * *

><p>Potions.<p>

It now terrified first years for an entirely different reason.

Harry and company had their first lesson the third day back and as they entered the room it could not have been more obvious that a different Severus Snape was running the show. The room wasn't any more light and cheery than it was before, but instead of the bare stone walls the room used to have exposed, it now seemed like Snape had gone and covered them not with colors but rather with textures.

The walls seemed to have alternating matte and semi glossy textures in the same pattern the stone work used to be, and behind the man's desk there appeared to be a mundane velvet poster for the Grateful Dead of all people. Even the roof wasn't exempt from the changes, now the room had an air of something like a tent palace, as sheets of green so dark it was nearly black covered the ceiling.

To Harry and Nym, the biggest change was an aromatic one. The room must have previously had some kind of banishing charm on it to remove clouds of harmful gasses. At least, that was the only thing the friends could figure based on the fact that no one got gassed and there weren't any open windows. Or closed windows, for that matter. The charm or whatever that was responsible for it never fully got rid of the odor of the potions that were used, and for the two metamorphs who routinely enhanced their senses significantly beyond human norm, it was a brutal assault on their nasal cavity every time they entered.

Now though, as Harry entered the dungeon, his nose wasn't telling him to duck and cover. There was a kind of minty scent, combined with something that was earthy and deeper. It wasn't unpleasant, which blew his mind more than the rest of Snape's changes combined.

He met Nym's eyes as she entered, and she too noticed something. As they made eye contact hers widened and Harry nodded with a smile on his face. She quirked her head to the side, she had no idea what the smell was either. Harry shrugged. They'd find out. It seemed enough for her, and the group all took their usual seats.

"Good morning students!"

His opening words scared them almost more than his behavior before had. Snape walked into the room from his office and stood behind his desk, looking down on his students with a warm smile on his face.

It honestly looked so unnatural that Harry's instincts were telling him to run. Hermione seemed to have shrugged it off, but nearly everyone else in the room looked like they were on the edge of fleeing.

"Now I know that I haven't been the nicest bloke in the past, I've taken so many points from most of you and in particular I have singled out , sorry, and his friends for ridicule in particular. I want all of you to know that has come to an end. Over this past yule break I have had a bit of a spiritual journey, and as my spirit guide Ivan has beat into my head, we are all just different expressions of the same human idea. We all live and breathe the same air, and we all love and hurt and die in the same way. My being what Ivan politely termed an 'arsehole' to you all was hurting myself just as much as it was you, and today it stops once and for all."

Harry was in shock. Shock didn't cover it. He hadn't accidentally touched any of the leftover LSD he had, did he? Closing his eyes Harry ran through his blood content looking for anomalies, and finding none he still wasn't sure he could believe what was in front of him. What the hell had he done to the man?

Maybe those mushrooms he owl ordered off that nahuatl shaman's estate had been a _lot_ more powerful than he thought.

Around him he saw Susan pinch herself to try and figure out if she was dreaming, and upon seeing her a number of the other students picked up the thought. Neville had closed his eyes and was murmuring something to himself, and of everyone Hermione was just sitting calmly waiting for the lesson to start.

Snape clearly must have anticipated this reaction, or he must have faced something similar in every one of the other classes he had taught so far this term. In either case, the professor waited a full ten minutes for the class to calm itself down and convince itself it mis-heard what he had said before he resumed.

"I'm sure at least some of you," the professor sent an agreeable nod Hermione's way, "Remember the talk I gave you on your first day, a load of tripe about bewitching the mind and ensnaring the senses, bottling death and all that. Well when I went back to look at the lessons I had planned for this upcoming term, I realized that thus far I have delivered on very little of the things I spoke. We've done some basic shrinking, boil cures, things of that nature, but we've done nothing that I'd advertised, nothing fun or significant. So for the rest of the term we'll be taking a small break from the normal things you'd be taught, and we'll all be moving into something a bit more useful and hopefully a bit more stimulating for everyone."

The class met his speech with more dead silence.

"Now the standard recipe for a calming draught includes an infusion of Hellebore syrup, which is poisonous and can induce feeling of rage and mania if properly prepared. It is in fact also the base for the rage inducing draught, which is a nasty concoction I assure you. Now the normal method includes an infusion of hellebore and then just a pinch of the ground down essence of unicorn hoof, which reverses the nature of the hellebore and makes the potion function. Any questions so far?"

Dead.

Silence.

"Excellent, you all understand, good good good!" Snape said as he clapped his hands together and busied himself pulling ingredient samples from around the room, "Now what we're doing today is testing a variant of this potion that I have just recently conceived of. I'm testing it with you all because even though you are novices, this potion has no ability to go wrong! The very nature of the ingredients we will be experimenting with halts the progress of any violent reaction. I myself have mixed the base ingredient," He said, brandishing a sealed container of a finely chopped green herb and a flask of a violently orange liquid, "With erumpent horn fluid and it actually mellowed the reaction to nothing more than one of those amusing wet-start firework the Weasley twins are so fond of! So I have all the ingredients set out for you now, and the instructions are on the board. I'll be walking around and seeing what I can help with. Let's get to it!"

No one made a move.

Snape sat calmly at his desk, watching the crowd of student before him not move a muscle towards the reagents he had lain out. Every Hermione was stunned when her mind finally connected that she had heard Severus Snape use the word help without sarcasm or irony in an actual sentence.

"Come now! It's not like I bite! I have apologized and I will attempt to make amends, I have something special brewing right now that I will soon be gifting to the many students I wronged, and hopefully that will convince you all further that I am not some sort of potions demon."

Harry honestly didn't know what to say. He very nearly felt bad about doing this to the once greasy man. Almost. It was a close thing. He _did_ hurt Nym after all. But wow.

It almost went without saying that nothing really got done the first potions lesson back. When no one lost points or received detention for not having done any work, the second lesson back was very nearly ruined as well.

Needless to say, they had to redefine Hogwarts normal.

A committee of Ravenclaw upper years was commissioned to ensure that the world they now inhabited was not significantly different from what they had last term. The group tested a number of Gamp's laws for consistency, and reaffirmed that the gravitational constant and speed of light in a vacuum remained the same, and when they were finished they released a report to the school's common rooms assuring everyone that a new normal had been reached and the implosion of the school into a magical null space was not iminent.

Their report was well received, and served to calm many. Potions lessons became tolerable if not less deeply terrifying.

* * *

><p>Midway through the first month back Harry recruited Neville into a spirited attempt to learn the intricacies of compulsion charms.<p>

Anything messing with the mind was something the friends had avoided up until that point, given how easy some of that magic was to mess up. The horrors wrought by misfired cheering charms alone...

At any rate Malfoy call him a jumped up halfblood, and Harry told Neville they'd be starting experimentation a bit earlier than they had thought. The sandy haired boy was entirely unsurprised to learn that harry had found a Slytherin volunteer for their early testing efforts as well.

Unbeknownst to either of the boys as they spoke in the Hufflepuff common room, Pomona Sprout wiped a mystifying tear of pride from her eye and Minerva McGonagall had to re-write her first letter of the term to the matron of the Weasley clan because she had broken out into a cold sweat and some of her ink ran.

By January twentieth Draco Malfoy was being regularly treated for an allergy to silver polish because of his strange tendency to break out into sneezing fits near the castle's suits of armor.

On January thirty-first, after having implied that Harry's mother would have enjoyed the romantic advances of the common tree slug, Draco began complimenting every first year student he met in oddly broken English. As his compliments tended to the things he knew best, the school began wondering if the boy was going to take up a career in fashion design. Several firstborn suggested that he may have a future in musical theatre, before one pointed out that the inability to properly string a sentence together in a compliment didn't lend itself well to song.

By February fifth Draco's grammar improved.

On the seventh Draco got into a fight with Ron Weasley in the upper courtyard of the castle. Harry and Luna were walking by the courtyard on their way to Hagrid (evidently a centaur had taught the Lady Norbert the finer points of 'Paper-Scissor-Stone' and she seemed eager for more players) when Draco used the confusion of the fight to try and curse them. Following that the young Slytherin began shouting 'Bollocks' at the top of his lungs whenever he picked up his wand.

February tenth finally brought home exactly how much harassment they took from the pint-sized Slytherin wonder. Draco walked up to the Hufflepuff table and told Harry that he might one day go the same way as his parents if he kept up his association with lesser beings. Harry laughed in his face until pumpkin juice unwillingly squirted from his nose, and when Nym explained that a metamorph losing control like that was tantamount to a normal person peeing themselves, the antagonistic Slytherin was laughed out of the great hall.

From then on whenever he attempted to sneer he had an all-consuming desire to eat a green apple, and he was soon seen to be carrying nearly a dozen on him at all times. He also found himself in no small amount of gastric distress after eating a bushel of apples every few days.

Initially Harry had planned on only doing a little bit here and there to the poor Slytherin idiot, figuring that he would soon find the error of his ways when he developed more weird habits the more he mouthed off. He had never figured on the extent to which inbreeding and preferential treatment degraded one's sense of cause and effect. He had also not counted on the first years figuring out the pattern so quickly, and beginning to route all of their trips between classes to coincide with Malfoy's schedule.

February fifteenth saw Harry cancel all of the compulsions on the boy because it was getting hard to get to class around the crowds of ickle firsties, and the elves were beginning to wonder why they were finding so many apple cores in the hallways.

On February sixteenth Malfoy asked Neville how his parents were doing, laughing all the while. Neville went white in the face when the blonde brat walked by and said that. It went without saying that going that far just wouldn't stand.

Harry and Neville disappeared that night after dinner, and every night again for the rest of the week. They spent all of their spare time together, conversing quietly in corners and suspiciously stopping whatever they were doing when anyone walked by or attempted to overhear. The pair didn't say anything about it to anyone, and when Hermione finally got exasperated about it and demanded they tell her what was up, she was met by a pair of knowing grins and tight lips.

The twenty-first was the date of that Sunday, and as the school got together for breakfast on that date Draco Malfoy and Ron Weasley both stood, and with quick movements made their way up to the space between the head table and the students. When they made it there the room went just a bit quieter, expecting some kind of a duel or other form of entertainment with their meal.

As the pair turned to face the masses of students, they weren't disappointed.

"So Malfoy, I heard that your dad just bought the Wimbourne Wasps, is that right?" Ron said to the room at large, easily projecting his voice to even the kids in the back of the hall.

"True enough, Weasel, true enough."

"And he's making you the coach now, inne'?"

"Also true!"

"Well," Ron said, as he turned to the boy next to him, "If you're going to be the coach, you must know the names of all the players."

"Sure enough I do!" Draco said, tucking his thumbs behind his waistband.

"Well in that case, ferret, would you be a dear and tell me?"

Nym turned to Harry after the last line with a questioning in her eyes, to which he responded, "Well Malfoy is always calling him a weasel, so we figured he should call him something, and the only animal we could figure was a ferret. Well that or a stoat, but stoats are feist and violent, and ferrets mostly just smell. It seemed right to me."

She moved her head from side to side, as if weighing the pros and cons of it, before she nodded and looked back up at the unfolding drama.

"Well..." Malfoy said as he ticked off fingers, "Who's on keeper, What's on Seeker, I don't Know's on beater with-"

"Woah, woah woah, hold up a minute here, Now Malfoy, you're the manager?"

"Yes."

"And your dad set you up to be the coach too?"

"Yes."

"Well then you should know the player's names then, shouldn't you?" Ron said with an exasperated air.

"Ideally, yeah."

"Well then tell me, Malfoy, who's on keeper for you?"

"Yes."

"No, I mean the fellow's name."

"Who."

"The guy on keeper."

"Who."

"The guy you've got guarding your goals."

"Who."

"The fellow on a broom hovering in front of you goals so that-"

"WHO'S ON KEEPER! Merlin, man! Do you not listen!"

Ron made as if to tear his hair out, "No, that's what I'm asking YOU! Who's on keeper?"

"That's the man's name!"

"That's who's name?"

Malfoy looked up, arms raised as if accepting manna from heaven, "Exactly!"

Ron just stood there looking like he normally did, the only issue being that he normally looked confused as hell, at least to anyone he attended classes with. He took a few steps away from Malfoy and seemed like he was trying to regroup his thoughts.

"Okay Malfoy, look, you've got a person playing keeper, dontcha?"

"Yep, fine fellow, too."

"Okay, and every month he has to get paid, right?"

"Certainly," Malfoy's eyes clouded, "Though those figures will do going down soon."

"Right, well when he comes in to pick up his pay, who gets the money?"

"Every galleon of it, yes sir."

Susan and Hannah turned from the comic styling's of Ferret and the Weasel to the two boys on the table opposite them, each of whom were smiling in a way that would put any and all canary catching felines to shame. In point of fact, if they hadn't seen it before, there would have been some concern that Harry's mouth would extend all the way round his head and it would just fall off.

"Okay you two, spill, how did you get them to be so emotionally engaged in this, I mean Weasley over there looks like he's about to burst a blood vessel."

Harry looked to Neville, bowing his head and raising his arms to the two ladies across from them. The boy colored, but said, "Well, you just have to tie the compulsion in with something the person already feels. Everyone knows how much that boy loves his quidditch, so compelling him to be into this wasn't hard, the hard part was Malfoy. Harry and I kept trying to come up with a way to get him to play the straight man and not object to the whole thing and break the spell, then it hit us, he loves feeling superior to others, so we tied it into that and it worked out fine as you can see."

Hermione looked like a body attached to a bushy brown lump on the table, slow bangs could be heard from where she sat.

Muffled by her hair, she said, "Who's on first? Why? Why am I friends with you monsters."

"Aw Hermione," Harry said, patting her shoulder gently, "You would be bored to tears without us to keep you entertained and outraged."

The bushy brown lump groaned and began banging her head on the table again. Harry patted her shoulder gently again and looked back up to the front of the room. Dumbledore seemed amused, as did most of the professors, even the still new and crazy Snape. Professor Sprout looked like she was giving Dumbledore's normal eye twinkle a run for its money, and McGonagall looked like she was caught between laughter and murderous disapproval. Harry strongly suspected from her facial expression that a stroke was imminent.

Back up on 'stage' Ron had a brief hissy fit and the pair engaged in a small slap fight when Malfoy asserted that not only was Ron right in saying that Who picked up a monthly check, but sometimes his wife came in and did it for him.

Placing his hand firmly on his head blocking his eyes and speaking in a pained voice Ron said, "All I want to know is what's the guy's name who plays keeper."

"No! What's our seeker."

"I'm not asking you who's seeker!"

"Who's the keeper."

"One position at a time!"

"Well it's not like we switch them around."

"I'M NOT ASKING YOU TO CHANGE ANYONE!" Ron roared at the boy across from him.

"Calm down, man!"

Turning around and covering his eyes, as if the very sight of Draco would drive him to madness followed shortly by homicide, Ron starting speaking slowly and deliberately, "What is the man's name who plays your keeper."

Draco nodded, saying, "No, what's our seeker."

"I'm not asking you who's seeker," the redhead said, continuing to enunciate as if he were talking to a five year old.

"Who's on keeper."

"I don't know."

"Oh he's one of our beaters!" Draco said brightly, "We're not talking about him though."

"How did I get on to the beaters!"

"You mentioned one by name?"

Ron turned, growled, and began advancing on his counterpart with violence in his eyes.

* * *

><p>When the routine wound down the pair of burgeoning comedians gave a bow to their audience and then, as if somewhere in the back of their heads a switch was flicked, they both looked around in identical blind panics.<p>

"OH GOD WHAT DID I-"

"WHY AM I UP HERE WHAT DID I-"

Their shouts of disbelief and dismay ran over one another as they each turned to their nearest professor and begged knowledge of what just happened. If anything, the laughter and applause just increased.

As Dumbledore twinkled and attempted to explain the jokes they had just completed, the boys were each turning a shade of red that Harry found both delightful and inspiring. Maybe, just maybe, there would be some peace and quiet in the halls and around the Hufflepuff table.

Probably not though.

That's fine, Abbot and Costello had more material.

* * *

><p>It was March before Harry figured out that the herb that Snape was having them all work with was actually Marijuana.<p>

Of course, in retrospect, it was obvious.

The psychedelic potions professional had gone to great lengths to never name the compound, instead just providing it to his students in copious amounts. He actually made a bit of a game out of it, setting his students to find the name themselves from their collected reference material. It was no wonder that apparently no one had found out yet though, given that the wizard and mundane hooligan communities had virtually no cross over. Hannah had even said that Madam Pomfrey was experimenting with the herb, and had her running trials of the potion on conjured mice in an attempt to nail down dosages and treatment plans with the new miraculous plant. The fact that the healer had a minor working with what many mundane considered to be a dangerous narcotic was worth more than a giggle.

The only reason Harry knew was through the research he had done in muggle pharmacology to modify the ritual he used on Snape.

But what in the name of the Devil's glorious glowing arse could he do with this information. Hermione would kill him, and then Snape, and then Herself, and then other people. There would be an international scandal, and assuming he wasn't murdered on principle, he would die of laughter. On the other hand, her research into the topic could prove to be among the most hilarious protracted jokes to ever occur in the modern age.

No...

That wasn't the way.

But maybe if he could get a few of the older blood purists into a room, maybe that Flint kid, or the... er... Whats-his-name... Montague, no wait, too young, those Selwyn twins! Yes!

* * *

><p>Beumont Selwyn woke as he usually did, buried deep within his covers and his proximity wards. Slytherin dormitories were dens of snakes in truth, letting others near without warning had resulted in loss of limb for men and women of lesser families.<p>

Rubbing the sleep from his eyes and with a deep yawn from his lungs, he sat upright in his bed and glanced at the _tempus_ anchored by runes to his nightstand.

5:30 am.

His body said it was too early, but his mind remarked brightly that if he was to appear on time to breakfast with finely dressed coiffure and pressed robes he needed to be up and about. As father always said, a man's appearance sets him apart from the lower breeds, and anyone willing to rely on an animal like those foolish little elves to make him appear proper was hardly a man at all.

He repeated father's words to himself every morning, but it never made leaving bed any easier.

Beside his _tempus_ was a small amount of finely ground green herb in what appeared to be a small chafing dish or incense dispenser. A small amount of herb in a chafing dish of incense dispenser that was both not there when he had gone to sleep the night before, and well inside the ward line he had established for himself in the shared dormitory of the sixth years. Now that meant one of two things, he either needed to owl home immediately for himself and dear Belmont to find stronger wards, or Professor Snape had come by again with yet another small gift. As if those strange little candies he had called 'quaaludes' weren't enough. He had the most strange and amazing dreams that night...

Shaking himself from his somewhat disturbing recollection, Beumont looked closer at the apparent incense dispenser to find a small note attached, "_Cast low powered incendio here."_

Professor Snape had never steered him wrong in six years of navigating the waters of Hogwarts and the maelstrom of the house of the cunning. Beumont couldn't, and wouldn't bring himself to trust the man, but pragmatically if he had wanted to hurt him or his twin by now, the professor would simply have already done it. Shrugging to himself he lit the incense and took a deep whiff before going to wake Belmont. They may have been identical bit for some reason the boy would just not-

An explosive cough ripped itself from deep inside Beumont's chest, breaking the silence of the dorm and ruining his early morning composure.

What the bloody hell was that! It had the same earthy scent that always seemed to fill the potions classroom these days, but so much stronger! It was strange, but despite the coughing fit, something about it was... Good?

Forgoing the daily wake up of his other half, Beumont took another deep breath of the herb Severus had left him, preparing himself this time for the coughing fit. It was definitely a good thing.

Without noticing the passage of time, the young man found himself taking six or seven more lungfuls of the delicious essence of the herb. It was so relaxing! Tension he had not even been aware of carrying seemed to fall off of him. Beumont leaned back into his bed, missing the fact that Flint, Rosier, and even his own twin were also up and examining their own incense dispensers.

A casual flick and muttered _leviosa_ saw the incense carefully rise and glide over closer to his bed, where the young scion of House Selwyn laid back and took another deep breath. Father's words weren't enough inspiration to start the day. If he had left them so fine a gift, Beumont felt so bold as to say that Severus himself would have defended the choice to lay back a bit this fine morn.

He had never considered it, but then he had never truly looked before, Had the green and silver of the hanging on his bed always been so profound and bright? The colors of his house calmed him even further on this day. Taking a twelfth or twentieth (did the number really matter?) deep breath of the smoking herb, Beumont settled further into his bedding, debating within himself the validity of tasting color.

* * *

><p>Harry grinned like a loon beneath his father's favorite cloak. If the snake's natural curiosity weren't enough, then the compulsion charms he placed on his hastily conjured burners would have done it. A small part of him felt bad for getting a bunch of sixteen year olds stoned off their respective gourds, but overall he just couldn't keep the feeling going. He chose the sixth years for a reason, they were some of the biggest blood purists and troublemakers for people with a lack of the same status in the entire school, and what's more, tens of thousands of boys in the same age bracket would pay all the money they possessed for the chance to get messed up on magically grown weed.<p>

Now, when they all didn't show up for class and were admitted to the hospital wing for the symptoms of extreme relaxation and above average appetite, the right people would make the right connections.

It was just like telling Hermione, except his way didn't get him killed and got a bunch of idiot Slytherins stoned. A win-win really.

* * *

><p>"Wait a minute, those Slytherins all got detentions for 'being too relaxed and hungry' to go to class? And their dorm was filled with Snape's miracle plant? But that would mean..."<p>

A small group of upper year badgers near Hermione snickered at her train of thought, and were promptly deafened by her scream of "WHAT THE BLOODY HELL!?"

* * *

><p>March tenth saw the reefer madness die down.<p>

Harry _really_ wanted to make that joke, but it would be insensitive at a time of great worry for most of his friends and while he was fairly certain Nym would laugh before hitting him, he just didn't need more trouble.

There had been another attack.

The one thing that Dobby, Justin, and Nick all had tieing their attacks together was the fact that they had all taken place without any kind of outward clue or identifying mark about what happened, or really even when it happened. The four of them had all just been found petrified. No wand signatures, no anything.

Leave it to Peeves to be different though. If nothing else was true the little blighter hadn't gone down without a fight.

The seventh floor, not a hundred feet from where Harry and Nym had found Rowena's old workshop, looked like a warzone. The walls between the classrooms on the floor were almost entirely busted down, and if Harry's favorite twins were to be believed, there had been a rather large amount of blood around too.

Drip and Drop, notorious gossips that they were, were more than happy to let Harry know what the adult types had found when they locked down the floor. Evidently breastplates were thrown around the wreckage like toast at a showing of the Rocky Horror Picture show, and a number of silver platters had been evidently conjured and strewn about in the same manner. Whatever Peeves had been fighting, he tried to make it see its reflection, and it had given him a merry chase before doing to the poltergeist whatever it had done to Sir Nick.

According to the elves, that wasn't even the weird part. There were huge amounts of what looked like some kind of acid squirted all over the place. The maintenance crew had the seventh floor back to normal the next day, but when Harry tracked down a few of them they told him that when they were called to the scene the acid trails were still smoking and eroding through layers of stone.

The friends had worked out why the platters and breastplates had been used, cockatrices, basilisks, and medusa were moved up the list of suspects, but the acid threw them all for a loop. What conjured or threw acid? Some species of dragon were venomous enough to possibly erode stone with a bite, but it was trails of acid and not bites. The basilisk had powerful venom, but again, it didn't make a lot of sense for trails of it to be around, it wasn't like the massive beasts had cobra blood in them. Why was this attack so damn... well... messy?

It was all just circles within circles, and the staff not announcing anything other than the seventh floor being closed for maintenance didn't help anything.

The only positive was Hermione stopped being concerned about magical Britain's _laissez-faire _attitude to what she believed to be dangerous narcotics.


	28. Chapter 26: Slithering into a Chamber

Chapter 26

It was Susan that actually put it together. Harry wasn't surprised by that though, she wanted to follow in her aunt's footsteps for a reason, and the reason wasn't because she was as much of a dunderhead as Snape used to claim.

What Harry _was_ surprised by was the conclusion she reached when she took all of their information and lined it all up in nice neat rows.

They had just gotten out of astronomy and were on the fifth floor heading back to the Sett when she stopped dead in her tracks and squeaked before using language very uncharacteristic for her.

"Fuck!"

Harry and his friends made up most of the badgers in their year group, but the few not part of their closer circle still stopped and looked inquisitive and helpful when their year mate acted so far out of character. Susan turned positively white in an instant, and she immediately sought out Harry's eye from the group, her expression pleading with him to get the message she needed sent.

Thankfully Harry also wasn't as much of a dunderhead as Snape used to claim, "Alright lads, I think my sister just remembered something, I need to talk to her for a minute. You all head back."

Ernie, Zacharias, and Leanne all looked like him as if he were an idiot for a moment, as Hermione, Hannah and the rest all seemed to question if they were included. No 'puff had forgotten that one of their own was still petrified in the hospital wing. They traveled in groups, it was the only solid thing anyone could come up with to be safer in the halls. Harry was quick to spot their reluctance and even quicker to point a glare in their direction.

For an instant their roommate who was quick with a joke, knew all the elves names, and was always the best at impromptu pillow fights disappeared. In his place stood the boy who killed a troll and a defense professor for fun, the boy who made the seventh years step lively when they talked about DADA because he had accidently put a few in the hospital wing when their practice got a little hairy. Neville loved Harry like a brother, but in that second even he gulped.

"I'll let you all know later, we'll be back to the common room in a bit. This is important, now _go._"

The rest of the puffs scattered as Harry turned to his sister, who had yet to regain any color. He really wished he was misreading her, but the sinking feeling in his gut and the rising murmur in the back of his head made him know better. Why was it never ice cream and cake, why was it always dog poo and knives?

"Harry we've been forgetting one of the most important facts about this whole thing. Whatever's been doing all of this, whatever destroyed the seventh floor, it came from Slytherin's secret chamber, yeah? Slytherin. The weird old guy who founded Hogwarts, _and died about a thousand years ago_," she finished in a quiet and terrified voice.

Harry had to pause for a moment, throwing that fact into the mix, "So if he laid this thing down when he was here, then it's been waiting in the dark for a thousand years. What kind of thing is this?"

"Hannah and I looked into this, remember? There aren't any weird enchantments that do this after a thousand years, and there aren't very many creatures that live that long and there are even fewer that can be heard by a parseltongue, Harry. A parseltongue like you. You remember that rip-kill-tear thing right before Mrs. Norris? Harry, it's a basilisk. It's a thousand year old basilisk. They only get stronger as they age, it's why international law forbids anyone let one live past its fourth birthday, and why breeding only happens in especially charmed communes in the Arctic Circle. I don't know how it got its venom all over, but a thousand year old basilisk's venom would definitely burn a hole in stone. HARRY THERS A BLOODY BUGGERING SHITE BASILISK IN THIS SCHOOL!"

Susan covered her mouth as she finished, like she wanted to deny her own words and her own logic. Harry could tell it had been grating on her for days, she had probably just put it together during the half hour she spent waiting for a telescope spot to open up.

"Fuck is right, Suze."

She nodded from behind clench fists.

"Horus preserve us. Suze, this is even worse. One wrong move and this thing could get out of here. A thousand year old basilisk would carve a damn road across Britain until either everyone was dead or some idiot gets lucky enough to kill it."

Susan just didn't stop nodding.

"The damn thing is probably using the pipes in the walls to get around. It could be anywhere. We can't tell anyone about this!"

"Hannah and I looked up weaknesses and everything, remember? There isn't a spell on this earth that could do more than make that thing mad. It would probably laugh at the killing curse. Harry what do we do?"

Harry looked at his sister for a moment. Maybe not his blood sister, but he took what he could get and the girl in front of him qualified. The moonlight shot down at them through a light dusting of clouds and the stained glass window they had taken temporary refuge next to. She was as pale as the light that let him see her, but beneath what could only be raw fear he could see a bit of the steel core that would see her through this.

A millennial basilisk. Fuck.

"Suze, you go right now back to the common room, and you tell everyone what you just told me. When you're done, go into my dorm, on my desk is a copy of _Hogwarts: A History_, it's hollow. I have a few stashes in place, just in case of things going wrong. In there is a big bag of floo powder, get everyone you can convince to the manor, and tell mum to come running. I know how we can shut down the pipes, at least for a while. We'll freeze it in place until mum comes here with the cavalry. Okay?" Susan gave a very shaky nod, there was a reason why she went to him, crazy bullshit was his specialty, "Go now Suze."

The red head made a great attempt at squeezing the life out of him, and ran past him in the direction the rest of the badgers had gone. For a moment he was alone. He felt a little bad about lying to her.

"God damn it. A basilisk. I swear to whichever one of you capricious sons of bitches is listening, if I have to deal with another bloody fucking mythical animal while I am at this school I will build you all altars and tear them down myself, you hear?"

Harry stared impotently at the sky and contemplated shaking a fist. As amusing a past time as hubris was, he had places to be. Breaking into a full sprint, Harry made it in record time to the seventh floor, stepping past the still fresh masonry he stopped in front of the tapestry of Barnabas the Barmy and paused for a moment to think.

This was a long shot, but he had a feeling about Rowena's fancy room. It had answered basic commands so far. 'Find me her research journals', 'Is there some more table space for a cauldron', things like that. There was more to it though, he could feel it. It wasn't like the lady had written a manual for the place, she had probably figured it as something she'd do later. Lord only knew how many things like that Harry had on his to-do list.

Harry had a feeling though, and from some of the rumors he had heard from the elves, he thought this place may be the come-and-go room. It gave you what you wanted, what you needed. Right now Harry needed a path to a great bloody snake, and a way to kill or distract the thing until his mum could arrive.

It wasn't like he could just go to Professor Sprout or Dumbledore and say hey, didn't you know you have the great grand-daddy of a seriously ticked off python in your basement? Just thought you ought to know, bye.

Harry wouldn't have believed Harry, and he was Harry. At least most of the time.

There was a list of reasons why this was a bad idea as long as Flitwick was tall. Written in tiny tiny handwriting too. A small smile crept up on Harry's lips as another train of thought derailed the first and made itself known. He really hadn't done anything foolish to risk his life so far this year, so far all the life and death had been other people's faults, and it really was unfair that other people got to risk his life and he didn't. What kind of world was this anyhow?

Harry took a step to begin his pacing in front of the wall. Three times was all he had to communicate his need. His second step brought him up short though, as a thin waifish girl with long blonde hair stepped from an alcove just down the hall.

"Harry, you're a huge bloody idiot, you know that?"

"Luna?" confusion ruled his mind for a second, it was about to be blood lust time, and she should have been asleep, what the hell?

"Yes, you foolish boy. You're just lucky the nargles were willing enough to make peace and let me know what kind of idiocy you're about to do."

The girl stepped closer to him, stopping just inside the normal social comfort zone. She folded her arms across her chest and looked up at him with silver eyes that for just a moment looked like they had seen too much, "You know I see more than most people. But what I think you don't realize is just how much more I see. Harry, it's mine to know what is needful*. I know where I need to be for things to be okay. I know what I need to do. On September first I knew where I needed to be to find you. Two years ago I knew what was about to happen and where I had to be to say goodbye. Tonight I knew just where I had to be so I could be here right now."

"You're a seer."

Half question, half statement. The idea resonated in Harry.

"Among other things, yes. But right now that isn't needful, Harry. What's needful is this."

As she finished her statement, she stood on the tips of her toes and closed the gap between the two of them. Her lips met Harry's softly, sweetly, and unless Harry was very badly mistaken she had been munching on some kind of spearmint candy recently. Or maybe she just tasted cool and sweet, the taste Harry associated with the idea of moonlight. It made sense.

Wait, he was kissing a girl, this was overthinking it.

Their lips only met for a few seconds. Maybe ten. Or fifteen. They broke contact, and a blush that could have stood in for a lighthouse found its way to Harry's cheeks. Luna stepped back out of Harry's personal space, one arm at her side and the other attached across her body sheepishly to the first. Harry's whole mind was unified for a moment in drawing a very large and very loud blank. Luna couldn't meet his eyes, just staring at his shoes as if they held all the answers in the world.

A few moments passed before Harry marshalled his thoughts enough to not quite splutter, "Needful?"

Luna finally met his eyes, "You need a really good reason to survive this. I've seen what happens if you don't. It's needful."

"A reason to survive this?"

Luna smiled, "You don't have a monopoly on being damaged goods, and definitely aren't the only observant one. Were you even thinking about making it out alive before now?"

His silence was answer enough.

"Now you have a reason to meet me out on the lawn in a few hours."

The poor boy sort of stood there and gaped like a fish.

"That's what I thought," Luna reached up and patted Harry on the head like he was a small dog, and she skipped away in the general direction of the Hufflepuff common room.

How did he get into these messes?

Oh wait! He was about to try and fight a basilisk! _That's_ why he was in front of the come-and-go room at one thirty in the morning!

Harry set a quick pace as he passed back and forth in front of the room's hidden door.

_I need a way to get to the monster from the chamber of secrets. I need a way to kill it. I need a way to survive._

It was his mantra for his trip, and as he made his third pass the wall shimmered and formed a high vaulted archway. It seemed as if it were made of obsidian, glistening in the low light. Harry walked to the door and placed a single hand on its surface, as if wakened by his touch the stone seemed to become liquid and fall away. Harry took a few tentative steps into the room, entirely not knowing what to expect.

A single light fell from nowhere onto a white pedestal in the middle of the room. The walls seemed to be made of the same black stone the door had been, which gave the room an air of being almost infinite in the darkness.

On the pedestal there rested a simple piece of parchment, and Harry's hope fell along with his mood when he saw it. He had really kind of hoped for some kind of magical anti-tank rifle, or a cauldron of re'em blood, or something.

Harry stepped to the pedestal and took up the paper.

_Check your lower back, AND you're bound to a phoenix. Dolt._

Hey, yeah! The Potter blade! Forged and blessed for him personally by the overlord of the Gringotts Goblin horde_. _Goblin steel couldn't be damaged and could cut anything, anything that could possibly damage it was absorbed into the blade just making the final product that much more deadly! After Quirrell last year he had kept it on him every day in a permanently disillusioned sheath. It had just become routine for him, he forgot about it. He had a fighting chance yet! And he usually didn't bother Hedwig, whose activities he had long ago decided went better when he just didn't ask questions.

That feathered menace had only just forgiven him for banning any form of ultimate fighting ring.

Then he reached the end of the parchment.

"Oh really, now I've got a room sassing me? Can anyone just let me cultivate a dangerous and semi-suicidal lone warrior vibe. I'm about to go fight a snake that outweighs most mundane aircraft. Throw me a bone here."

Another parchment appeared on the pedestal.

_Sorry._

"Thank you!" Harry couldn't keep the smile off his face.

Another appeared.

_Git._

Harry went back to frowning, "When I'm done with this, we'll be having words, you and I."

The pedestal began slowly sinking into the ground. When it reached the ground the floor in a strip around it began sinking, and then another below it, until a staircase lay before him, a yawning hole into darkness.

"I'm guessing this will lead me the right way? Thanks, err... room. Anyway, Hedwig?"

His favorite bird appeared on his shoulder in a flash of her own brand of eternal flame.

"You wanna come help me kill a thousand year old basilisk, girl?"

The phoenix squawked indignantly, as if to say, "What do you think? I'm here aren't I?"

"I never doubted you," He said soothingly, as he began his descent.

* * *

><p>What was with angsty old dark wizards and dark colors? Did every single dark lord have to be all into black and dark reds and greens? Why couldn't a single one of the old festering bastards just go with a nice yellow for their fortress of evil color scheme? Maybe a little bright red or blue or something?<p>

The chamber of secrets was massive, and it was dark. Pillars of black stone filled the area, and Harry was moving with his eyes down and his nerves on a hairpin trigger. His feet silenced, his invisibility cloak around his shoulders, and his right hand on the pommel of the blade at his back. Hedwig had flamed away somewhere, but Harry could feel her just at the outside of his perception. She was waiting for some kind of cue to flame in and save his dumb ass, Harry just hoped that the snake he was about to face would not see her and underestimate him for just a moment. Not that he could do a hell of a lot.

As he silently made his way around pillars and towards a dim light to the north (he thought it was the north, his sense of direction was pretty good, but a mile or so of circular stairs in the dark was enough to throw anyone off), Harry heard a kind of hissing noise.

As he wound his way closer, the hissing resolved into words he could make out over the constant dripping noise in the chamber.

"-this is bad."

And the same voice, but in a curiously different tone, "_No it's not! We kill them, we are supposed to kill them!_"

"Sal never told us to kill!"

"_Sal is dead! And he was an arse! Screw whatever he said, the bastard left us to rot in this dirty hole!_"

"SAL WAS GOOD! And there wasn't always two of us. New Master's fault!"

"_At least new master commands us to eat!_"

"New master commands you to eat! New master tells me to shut up. Well, girl new master tells me to shut up. Boy new master likes my jokes!"

"_Boy new master is an idiot! We should eat boy new master!_"

"I should eat you!"

Harry wanted to sit down and cry. The voices, of course, came from the same source. A basilisk. A giant poisonously green snake the length of A FUCKING BOEING 747. It lay in the middle of an absolutely massive open space at what could only be the head of the hall. Behind it, an enormous statue of what could only be Salazar Slytherin.

Harry would have looked around a bit more, but he was pretty distracted by the snake in the middle, a snake that seemed to be fighting itself? It was talking to itself in a way that felt eerily like that Gollum fellow from the Lord of the rings, and as Harry watched it a lot of things started making sense.

It was no wonder the attacks hadn't all been fatal or on children. The thing didn't even want to be doing it! Half of it anyway. And with the way it was spitting at itself and coiling around as it did so, there was no wonder trails of its venom had gotten all over the floor, the thing was mad as a hatter in vat of mercury.

And he had to do something about it. Then meet Luna on the lawns out front.

Harry drew his blade and moved silently around the edge of the open space, his eyes still low and only peripherally seeing the coils of the great beast. The death gaze was going to be a problem. Concentrating for a moment, Harry did what he could to make his muscles as dense as possible. He took a last look at how the snake was positioned and closed his eyes, hoping against all odds that he wouldn't accidentally make the last eye contact of his life.

Holding his blade in his right hand and his wand in his left, Harry crouched. He tensed all of his muscles and listening for the slightest change in position, he sprinted and jumped with his blade extended in front of him.

For what felt like hours he moved through the air, right up until he hit a brick wall, his blade finding purchase and sinking its whole length into the hide of the basilisk. The monster roared its displeasure at the sudden presence of an unwelcome passenger. As he opened his eyes for a bare instant, his laughter mixed with the roar of the beast, _he hadn't missed!_

Harry now lay against it, one white knuckled hand clutching the sword that held him there, just below the monster's head. It couldn't look at him if he were attached above the eyes, now could it?

There was a single instant of quiet and stillness, and all Harry could think for a moment was that his plan had worked, but now what? The monster had found his laughter less amusing than his sword however, and decided to give the flea on its back a bit of a roller coaster ride.

It reared up, tossing its head from side to side and all the boy attached to it could do was scream, "Fuck I didn't think this one through!"

The basilisk began weaving itself through the columns of its lair, moving up and down the pillars as it tried to scratch the annoying thing off of its back. It twisted completely round while it was in the air, and moved with a speed that again reminded the boy on its neck of a bloody jumbo jet.

The chambers which had been nearly as quiet as a grave before were filled with the sound of his cursing.

"Fuck! Jesus Christ help me! Oh god why didn't I see this coming! FUUUUUUUUUCK!"

The snake finally managed to manipulate itself so that it could crush the bug on it beneath its bulk, but as it crashed downwards Harry leapt from its back to the only place he could reach, the flat head of a snake carved around the circumference of one of the columns. The basilisk crashed to the ground and tried to slither forward, but in the end just jammed Harry's short blade further into itself and ripped a massive gash into its skin where the blade caught in a crevice on the floor.

The serpent on the floor screamed in deep inhuman agony as it split itself open with a gash four meters long. Blood flooded from the wound and colored the floor for meters around a dark crimson.

Harry looked around for a way to get down to the beast and finish it off, unable to believe his luck in fighting it so far. He stood easily ten meters from the floor, a distance which gave him pause, if only for the writhing animal on the ground beneath him. Harry held with one hand onto the column, and made to move around to find a softer landing site when the stone head he stood on gave way.

He had a moment in which he uttered, "God damn shoddy pureblood construction." Before he fell from his place above the pained animal and after a quick eight meters found himself immersed the disgusting and poison filled viscera of a thousand year old extremely angry snake.

A distant part of his mind noted with amusement that this wasn't the best night he had ever had.

For once Harry's bone and muscle density increases worked against him. His frame may have topped out at five feet, but he weighed in at nearly a hundred kilograms. It all added up to him falling waist deep into the side of the basilisk, whose terrible cries of agony only increased.

Harry seriously considered cutting off his sense of hearing.

The basilisk ceased it's writhing for a moment, and in an attempt to divest itself of its own personal human space invader, it began rotating. Harry had an instant before his torso received a crash course in the application of force in the shear direction, so he took the only route available to him. Curling himself into a ball, Harry buried himself in the body of the basilisk.

He _really_ had better nights than thing one. Leagues better. Light-years better. He wanted a shower.

The basilisk moved the cut to face downward, cutting off any route of escape as well as the only source of fresh air for the boy trapped inside it. Harry lay just a scant half dozen meters or so from the skull of the great monster. The enormous ribs of the beast's spine jutted sharply into his side and hip, nearly drawing blood on their own. Not that he would have been able to tell given how much blood he was surrounded by. Harry forced himself into a ramrod straight position, his muscles straining against the muscles of beast more than two hundred times his weight and size.

Somehow, in the course of his wild ride, his long jump, and his short fall, Harry never lost hold of his wand. Transferring the stick of sweet wormwood from his left hand, over a section of what was probably snake esophagus, to his right was a chore. The fact that he was running out of air didn't help anything. The basilisk seemed to know the position it had him in, as the flesh around his resisted all of his movements.

When he finally got the wand to his right hand Harry spent a moment to thank any god that happened to be passing by for the fact that _bombarda_ only needed to be pointed at the target. Wand movements would have _sucked._

The basilisk took that moment to try a different tact, curling its head about as much as possible, it seemed to try to simply squeeze Harry to death or perhaps just force him out of itself. Whatever it had intended, the result was one of its bones piercing Harry's hip so hard it gouged a small hole into his femur.

Harry summoned the last air he had in himself, and fueling the spell with the pain from his pierced leg he shouted _BOMBARDA_. The spell impacted the flesh immediately in contact with the tip of the wand, and its effects went in two directions. Harry was first thrown from the body of the snake as the backlash from the explosion knocked him nearly senseless. It was only the searing pain all over his skin as he landed that told him proximity to a basilisk's venom producing glands was just as bad an idea in practice as it seemed on paper.

The second result of the explosion was the severing of the snake's spine around six meters from the base of its skull. The majority of its body went into minor spasms as the final impulses from the brain broke off their connection.

For the first time during the fight, Harry and the snake shared screams of pain.

Hedwig flashed into being from wherever she had been at the edge of Harry's awareness. She cried innumerable tears over his face and neck, fighting to keep the venom he had nearly been immersed in from killing him outright. Harry fought against the nerves all over his body that reported being dipped in acid, lit on fire, and salted all at once, his feathered friend's efforts just barely getting him the edge in keeping his mind. As he grappled with the agony his body spasmed out of his control, his features morphing randomly from his all consuming pain.

It was minutes of fiery agony that felt like years before the phoenix won out over the basilisk, and Harry regained control. His body was inundated almost entirely with the venom of a basilisk that had aged in the dark for a thousand years. If it had had been alcohol, Harry would have been legally drunk in countries without liquor laws, but between the bird on him crying and his ability to spread those selfsame tears, after about fifteen minutes he was able to stand.

Somehow, just a few meters away, the basilisk was still alive. Harry staggered to the side of the animal's immense head, and with a brief movement he cast the strongest piercing hex he knew up through the snake's soft palate and into its brain.

He sat down again, heaving a sigh that felt larger than he was. Leaning against the snake's severed head, he closed his eyes for a moment. Fighting was tiring. Also taking a bath in basilisk venom and guts. Harry really wanted a shower. It was quiet again though, which was a nice change of pace from all of the screaming.

He still had a lot of venom in and around his blood. Unless he missed his guess there may also have been a piece of basilisk bone embedded in his hip, which was fun. He needed Nym to help him figure out if he would ever get all the basilisk out of himself. A nice trained St. Mungos healer wouldn't go amiss either.

The quiet dripping of the chamber followed him into the darkness as he dozed off, the adrenaline from the fight, both natural and what he had pumped through his system, was wearing off and their absence was taking what little energy he had away from him.

* * *

><p>Harry woke with a start, something which he was privately surprised happened at all. Something was up. Something changed in the room. The hair at the back of his neck was prickling, which meant either there was danger, or the venom he had been exposed to was leaving behind some kind of lingering neurological effect.<p>

Harry really hoped for the first one.

Groaning quietly he made a valiant effort at standing. His hip burned like the dickens, and all of his joints seemed to protest his movement at the same time. His bones seemed to be aiming for a parliamentary filibuster on his idea of movement, but thankfully his body was more of a dictatorship than anything else, so his brain overrode their complaints and after a moment he actually got to his feet.

Craning his head, he finally made out what had disturbed him. A pair of quiet footsteps were making their way through the gloom towards him.

Shite.

Probably boy and girl master. He really didn't have another fight in him.

As they approached he heard a strangely stilted conversation between the two. It was like the Weasley twins in a disturbing way, two voices rang out as one, each providing both sides of the conversation.

"We must check on our snake."

"The poor thing is in trouble, our orders confuse it."

"We are a 'we', of course our orders confuse it."

"Well how were we to know this would happen? Our vessel being shared. It was never a scenario we envisioned!"

"It does not help that we talk to ourselves."

"Quiet, you. Or us. Me? Osiris overlook us, we are in trouble."

"If they know of our pet, then we must hide these forms here. Two souls will surely make us strong, even if they are a traitor and a mudblood."

The pair of people, first years if their heights were anything to go by, walked slowly forward, making their way to the hulking body of the snake. They had evidently seen it, but in the gloom not managed to catch the colossal amount of damage the thing had taken. Harry ghosted his way behind them, matching their pace step by step and examining them to try and figure out this we thing.

The pair of students walked perfectly in step, and at first glance the even appeared to be holding hands. As Harry closed though he finally made out what connected them, their hands did not touch, but instead each held a side of what looked like black leather-bound book. The soul talk was what got him though. It sounded like what had happened to Quirrell. It sounded like maybe a possession.

Now that made sense. It even served as an explanation for why the damn snake was so barmy. It answered to one master in two bodies, no wonder the thing had developed its own kind of split personality. Who the hell even knew what kind of control spells Slytherin had lain down on the thing.

Possession, control spells, the heir of Slytherin. Harry wasn't an investigator or anything, but given what he had already done today, the idea that this whole thing was Voldemort's fault didn't feel that farfetched. Or maybe he was jumping at shadows. Or maybe it was that neurological damage thing again. Ever since he had woken, despite his bodies reams of paperwork protesting said actions, he had felt curiously off. He needed to deal with whatever was going on with these kids and get himself to a healer.

Running out of patience, Harry simply stepped between the two and grabbed the book from their hands. If they were hanging on to it so oddly, and if they were talking like they were one person, maybe it was something having to do wit-

Harry screamed.

As soon as he touched the weird book arcs of cold electricity ran up and down his body, freezing him where he stood and burning his nerves like the time his old cousin had wired him into a wall outlet. Back then Harry had short circuited the neighborhood and not been able to move for the better part of a day. Now, Harry collapsed like a sack of bricks exactly where he stood.

The two kids were quick to turn around and snatch their book back from him as he lay on the ground unmoving.

"We did not see this coming," the boy said. A detached part of Harry's mind noted the guy's name. Colin Creevey.

"No, no we did not. We thought maybe these bodies would drive him here, but we did not think he would find his way here unprovoked." Ginny Weasley. As if the hair weren't enough of a tip off, Harry still had minor nightmares about the look of desire on her eleven year old face the night of her sorting.

"How did how did he survive our pet? We have heard that he speaks the serpent tongue, but that should not be enough. Our pet would not survive a third master."

Harry was putting himself back together for the second time that night, and was finding it surprisingly easier. He only had a few seconds while the two firsties talked to themselves, but already he felt like he could swing an emergency vote in the senate of his central nervous system and get things back in gear.

Touching that bloody book just wasn't going to happen, especially after his reaction to it, but Harry knew it had to be key in whatever the hell was going on. Of course his wand lay just a few meters away from him, thrown from his hand when the current from the book burned through his system.

What Harry needed was his short sword, his knife. He was still covered in blood, a fact the firsties had missed, so he figured a large man with chunks of flesh in his hair and clothes clutching a knife may be what he needed to be for a minute here. Possessed or not, it would likely freak them out. Of course he had lost the damn thing when the great bloody snake had tried to crush him, so as far as he knew the thing was lying in a pool of basilisk venom somewhere.

Where in the nine hells was it?

The Potter blade was unquestioningly of Goblin manufacture. Their steel had a pattern to it, somewhat like Damascus steel, but where variations in the carbon content of Damascus steel results in the tiny and intricately weaving pattern it was so known for, Goblin steel's bands of color were wider and had a significantly larger gradient of colors. Harry could never have pretended to be a metallurgist, or an armorer, but the blade was beautiful to him. It was heavy and wide near the grip, and tapered down to a rounded point. Its sides were graced with an engraving on one side of a Goblin with an upraised fist holding what appeared to be the sword of Gryffindor, and on the other the same but with a man. It was made in a form the Goblins favored, called a cinquedea, a form popular in mundane Italy around the time the statute of secrecy was made and the ICW formed.

Harry could see it clearly in his mind, every groove and band on the blessed metal. He had marveled over it for days when he received it, like any preteen boy would. Then of course it just became something he had in his trunk, and later something he strapped to his lower back every morning. All he could do now was think fondly of it and wish from the depths of his soul that a whispered _accio_ could get it to him without a bloody wand. If only.

From somewhere deep in the chamber came a sound much like that of an arrow being loosed, and in a gunmetal blue blur, his sword came hurtling through the air towards him. In what could only have been a twist of fate, the Goblin steel tumbled uncertainty in the air of the chamber and as it closed on the three of them it pierced the diary still held between the two kids, grip slapping securely into his palm with its prize still firmly stuck on it.

Harry could only stare blankly at his blade and wonder what the bloody hell just happened.

He continued staring right up until the two children in front of him collapsed and a piercing scream lit up the air in the chamber for what could only be the hundredth time that night. The key difference this time though was that the terrible noise was coming from the book impaled on his sword. A book which appeared to be bleeding ink in colors Harry had never even suspected existed.

After a few minutes the two weird firsties were still unconscious and the weird-ass book finally stopped yelling. Ink still pulsed weakly from it, as if it had a heart that ran on the stuff which was slowly shutting down.

Still in a sitting position Harry looked down on himself only to find that a hundred shades of ink had joined the pieces of basilisk on him to form a terrifying and unsanitary mess. Harry was just thankful that his invisibility cloak shrugged off all substances trying to touch it like it was protected by an imperturbable charm.

The quiet dripping of the chamber reigned supreme again, and Harry couldn't help but to break the silence. Hedwig appeared in a brief flash, landing once again on his shoulder. Harry looked over at the bird and asked in a subdued voice, "Do you think twelve year olds can retire? Can I just stay on a nice beach somewhere?"

The immortal bird shook its head side to side in an odd avian shrug, a brief note leaving her beak. Harry just ran a hand through his bloody hair.

"Yeah. I would get bored, wouldn't I?"

* * *

><p>The sun shone fiercely through the windows by the time Harry found his way back. Basilisk hide may have resisted spells, but without the creature's internal magic resisting change, a wand poked in the viscera and a murmured <em>reducio<em> saw the carcass shrink to the size of a fully mature Burmese python.

Harry had the two first years floating behind him as he finally made it back to the come-and-go room, the basilisk's carcass lying around his neck like a terrifying poisonous necklace. When he reached the top of the staircase, his legs protesting the distance he had to traverse a second time, the stairs flowed back up into the floor and a pedestal rose from the ground bearing another parchment. Harry fought the urge to roll his eyes as he plucked it from its resting place.

_You smell. Also you are awaited outside the castle. Hogwarts has seen fit to lock itself down pending your return._

"Oh I kill a basilisk and probably save these two from some kind of freaky possession and I'm the smelly git. Yeah. I see how this works, room."

He managed to fill the last word with annoyance and disgust. A short pop saw another parchment appear.

_Git._

"Oh yes, we'll be having words. Right after I sleep. And shower. And find anti-venom. And talk to mum, oh god it's going to be a long day."

* * *

><p>(AN): The idea of Luna being a seer and her talents being directed towards knowing what is needful stole shamelessly from Perfect Lionheart and his/her Partially Kissed Hero.

Special thanks to Runecutter, whose strange thoughts have helped me figure out what the hell I'm doing here. I'd like to urge all of my readers with amusing anecdotes or ideas to PM me with them like Runecutter has. I develop my ideas best in a dialog, so talking with interested readers helps.


	29. Chapter 27: The ending legit begins here

Chapter 27

Posters were made of that view. They sold copies worldwide. They were reprinted in half a dozen editions. In his early 30s, Harry signed one copy and only one copy. It sold, and the profits of that sale resulted in the establishment of four full ride scholarships, the creation of a half dozen soup kitchens in both the mundane and magical worlds, and a children's mission just off Diagon alley.

Harry was most proud of the last one.

The view in question was the first one anyone saw of him in over thirteen hours. The wards of Hogwarts locked down that morning when Amelia Bones arrived at the gates with half a hundred aurors, including some woken from retirement specifically to take care of nieces, nephews, and grandchildren.

Every student, professor, and incorporeal being in the castle experienced a brief moment of what felt like portkey travel before finding themselves outside the gates of the school. They all arrived in a massive jumble, a few being able to keep their feet, and the bulk of them coming together in a heap in front of Amelia's assembled forces.

To the delight of Hogwarts and most of the upper year lions, two Slytherins were caught in a compromising position, with the lady in question having no small amount of rope burns and being positioned as if she were lying on a table.

A head count was taken, to the surprise of only a few, Harry Potter was missing. To the surprise of the masses, the littlest Weasley and a firstborn named Colin Creevey were also not among the group outside.

Hogwarts, sentient being that it was, had a thing about showing off. The castle coveted no jewels, it desired no power. In its nearly five hundred years of full self-awareness, it had never experienced hunger or thirst, gluttony or sloth, wrath or envy, greed or lust. It felt love for its students, love of knowledge, and immense pride in the same. That set of standards and priorities led to a number of peculiarities.

All entrances to the ground were at the apex of a small hill, regardless of actual local topography. Nearly any time of day the sunlight or moonlight, regardless of cloud cover, could be seen glinting off at least a few of the windows in the distance. And probably most peculiarly, the grand tour of the school was always the fastest way to wherever you were heading on your first day back from any stay away from the grounds of over three weeks.

So in a way the castle was really at fault for it.

Harry had taken a rest at the door to the come-and-go room. He took another rest at the second floor stairs. One final rest stop was made at the entrance hall, so when he finally covered the grounds to reach the Hogsmeade gate that everyone had been dumped in front of, he no longer looked quite so peaked.

Harry reached the small rise that lead to the gate out. The wards had been locked just outside the fence line, denying the youth of the nation and the collected aurors a view of him until just as he crested the hill. Behind him on the small cobblestone knoll the shrinking charm on the Basilisk which he had shrugged from his shoulders expired, resulting in a massive rush of air as the size and weight of the beast reasserted itself.

From where wizarding Britain focused on their side of the fence, an immense headless snake corpse simply appeared just behind the wards, so large that it could be seen from outside the ward line.

A few screams marked its appearance, but the lack of a head calmed everyone down almost immediately. The scrape of a boot on stone directed their collected gaze to the gate of Hogwarts, where a triumphant but exhausted harry potter stood, pushing open one side of the entrance.

Harry stood six feet tall, with broad shoulders. Across one of them was the filthy body of Colin Creevey, and floating over the ground just behind him was the still form of Ginevra Weasley. His left hand secured the leg of the boy, his right held the Potter blade which was still stained with the blood of his enemies.

The boy himself, though the figure he cut would make anyone present edit that noun to man, was covered head to toe in grime and blood. His hair stood short, and untamable. Dyed almost red from the time he spent inside the basilisk.

He stood there for a moment in the noonday sun as every child, most parents, a significant fraction of the police force, and every available reporter took in the vision of him in awe.

Then Harry had to go and ruin the moment. Setting Creevey softly on the ground, Harry scratched his nose with his free hand and looked out onto the amazed crowd saying, "What? Have I got something on my face?"

Luna, never one to give up on an opportunity, cheerily walked to his side with a bounce in her step. As the crowd stared on dumbly, she reached up to his face and peeled a small basilisk scale off of his right cheek where it had gotten stuck at some point during the fight.

"Got it for you!" she said with a bright smile.

* * *

><p>Harry returned slowly to consciousness. The moment he became conscious of his eyes, he immediately wished for thicker eyelids. Sleeping potions were great and all, and by Hera he had needed a few hours, but they really left him light sensitive when he got up.<p>

As he brought himself a bit further out from sleep he noticed a warm weight pressed to his left, and a depression in the bed to his left. It was probably Susan and mum. Or Nym and mum. Or Luna? When in the hell did he get so many girls in his life to care about him?

And what was up with Luna anyway? At least he felt like Nym made sense most of the time. Maybe it was the metamorph thing but he got her. Biology aside, they were cut from the same cloth.

Gods above, mum was gonna be angry.

Harry stirred gently. The warm person next to him was cuddly in the extreme. Whoever it was had both arms around his, and were squeezing it to their chest gently. Harry heard a gentle snore as well. Unfortunately the weight was pressing his arm into the cushions of the hospital bed, and his blood flow was getting crimped.

He could probably just kick up his heart analogs in the region and use the increase in local pressure to alleviate his problem, but he needed to get off his butt and face the day anyway, so sitting up it was.

With a groan, his joints still not feeling very forgiving after the whole 'inside a basilisk' thing, Harry removed his arm from beneath the weight to his left and sat up. When his back was finally against the headboard, he opened his eyes, and his hearts did a bunch of funny loops in his chest.

Nym was next to him. Her hair had gone back to that bright pink shade she liked so much, and her face lost some of the lines and angles she liked to give herself. She was just... softer. And she groaned lightly as she adjusted to his movement, still plainly unwilling to give up on Morpheus and his work.

Mum was sitting in a chair to his right, her arms on the bed next to him with her head resting uncomfortably on them. She hadn't woken up yet either, though her sleep looked a lot more troubled than his best friend's had. Her eyes were a little puffy and red. Mum had been crying.

The colors of the curtains around him were enough to confirm it, and Harry was thankful again that mum had brought him in to saint Mungo's. Madame Pomphrey was nice enough, but he had needed something a bit more specialized.

When the crowd finally broke and Amelia had taken control again the previous day, Harry had been more than ready for a healer. He may have had as much or more experience working with the human body as the average first year doctor, but he wasn't as good as the specialists 's employed in the magical hospital.

The basilisk had a few hundred pictures taken of it, and then the press had been let at it. That was the last Harry had seen before his mum shoved a portkey in his hands and a healer had shoved a vial of the good stuff at him.

Harry wondered if it were necessary for them to examine him in his sleep, or if it was a professional fetish thing. Poppy always did it. Or maybe it was just how much time he spent unconscious?

Harry was dissembling.

Seeing mum with puffy red eyes sleeping at his side wasn't good.

She was probably worried about him. Harry got that, at least on an intellectual level. That was the problem though, that was the disconnect. Harry understood it intellectually but just had no kind of real emotional connection to the idea. For more than half of his life, death had looked like a nice relief from his day to day. Harry had no gut reaction that said this is a bad idea, you might die. Why would he not go confront a basilisk to get his friends and mum a momentary advantage in their battle against it?

Harry knew that to his mum he had value. And he knew that to Nym he had value. Susan liked him, Luna probably did given what happened before he went off to that snake.

In the end though, Harry didn't really place value on Harry.

It was as simple as that. The part that made it really weird was that he knew it. Harry completely knew that he shouldn't do a lot of the stuff he did. Sure, some of it was an accident, like Gabby last summer, but really what the hell kind of person picks a fight with a troll and kills a professor their first year at boarding school, then manages to go back to the place like nothing happened.

Harry wasn't too sure where he stood on the live or die issue. He was undecided. Life was good, but he had a lot of things he wanted waiting for him on the other side too. Harry was at peace with that. Breathe in, breathe out. Live, die. It made no difference.

Amelia wasn't so keen on that line of reasoning though, a fact which hurt Harry almost as much as the basilisk had.

Amelia had saved him. She'd given him a home, and a sister, and best friend. She had healed him, and made sure he was okay, and she didn't really need to do any of those things. Harry would kill in a moment if it would save her, and he'd die a bit quicker if it furthered the same end. It was just a value comparison, her advantage was worth more to him than the life of anyone outside the family. Seeing her in pain like that, especially over something he did...

He was glad Nym was there making him feel kinda cuddly, because without that, all he would have was the shame of making mum worry and cry.

Harry stared at his family around him for a while, basking in the warmth for a bit. He wasn't looking forward to mum waking up. Nym would just slug him in the arm and the hug him and they'd be alright.

He was what he was though.

* * *

><p>Mum cried.<p>

And the worst part was that Harry didn't have an answer for her. Amelia was an investigator, two incidents were enough for her to grasp the handle of a larger pattern, and when Harry presented her with an artfully mounted Basilisk head for the wall behind her desk, she had a good grasp on this one.

Hours were scheduled for Harry with mind healer Octeus again. She was willing to make the trip to Hogwarts, and if it made his mum happy, Harry would do it. His reasons were so basic to his world view that he doubted it'd get anywhere, but he'd try.

Nym slugged him then hugged him. Susan insisted on hugging him at every opportunity and refused to be parted from him.

Hannah took him by the shoulders and looked him square in the eye, "Harry James Bones. This is why we can't have nice things."

Harry took some solace in the fact that her mood flipped when he presented her with a nice basilisk skin jacket one of his house elf friends had made for him.

Neville forgave him for the price of a pair of basilisk skin boots, though he did warn the poor deranged boy that if he kept up this pattern Neville's requests would get more extravagant.

Luna kissed his cheek and told him he did well. Then she skipped away muttering something about introducing the squid to the nargles. That one confused him.

* * *

><p>For once, Hogwarts found something it couldn't immediately adjust to.<p>

It seemed that a twelve year old killing a thousand year old murder-snake was something that while merely uncommon in the magical world, still shook people up enough to warrant a decisive change in equilibrium. The poor Ravens who had rewritten the definition of the new normal just a few short weeks before were all struggling to check their figures again.

The Hufflepuff community treated him no different. Fighting a basilisk was uniquely Harry, and his rationale was so in tune with the party line that if she had known, Pomona Sprout would have cried and given him a hundred points. Of course the fact that all the media attention resulted in the immediate revival of their lost badger helped a lot too.

In fairness to the Ravenclaw community, they had never really looked at him as anything other than an interesting problem to be solved. His performances and vital statistics all pointed to something enigmatic and decidedly unique from a magical perspective. This latest news was just another entry in a long list of 'Harry Bones: Huh?' facts posted on their common room board.

The snakes just hated him, though it was a lazy hate. He had hardly been subtle with his identity, so his blood status was well known and that was enough for the more die hards to hate him. On a personal level, most of his year group in the den of snakes sided with Malfoy. Overall though, he was just a badger, and therefore beneath their notice.

The lions occupied a similar position. His behavior was very Gryffindor, but he was a Hufflepuff. The lions were the 'light' side of the superiority debate, but in their own way they hit all the same points and the end result was the same as Slytherin. They weren't fond, but he was a 'Puff and didn't matter. The only real positive was that they got Nearly Headless Nick back, and even that was mostly cancelled out by getting back.

That was, of course, just the school. While the collected opinion of the entire underage population of the UK and a portion of Western Europe wasn't something to sneer at, it surely wasn't the end-all be-all of the public opinion whirlpool Hogwarts found itself drowning in.

After a full week, reporters were still getting caught using polyjuice to try and get to Harry in the halls. The pictures of Harry on the hilltop had driven a public furor the likes of which had hardly been seen since the death of Voldemort. Harry didn't fully understand it, after all the snake died after only one instance of being killed. Hardly dark lord material.

It had been March when Susan had figured out the Hogwarts yearly mystery, and Harry had gone and murdered a ruddy great snake. By the time healers had pronounced him inexplicably fine despite constantly having basilisk venom in his bloodstream, it was just barely April.

That meant that on the sixth, the first Tuesday of April and Harry's first Tuesday back in the castle, it was kind of a surprise to see the twelve members of the Hogwarts board of governors walk into the entrance hall like they owned the place. In a curious coincidence they mostly did, inasmuch as Harry didn't feel like declaring by fiat that the castle answered to him. Honestly the legal grounds were there for both groups, so it would be a long protracted battle that no one really wanted. In the end it was easier for Harry to just leave them with their delusions of ownership. At least until he tracked down and killed or married all of the remaining members of the Slytherin and Ravenclaw families.

But he digressed.

Lucius Malfoy strode into the great hall at the head of a group of eleven other witches and wizards, each of whom had a pile of luggage moving next to them. It was apparent that they were intending to move in, and all Harry could do was hope that none of his brother elves were beneath the five foot tall piles of pastel colored trunks and containers.

At the head of the hall Dumbledore stood from his golden throne and projecting his voice across the hall he said, "Ah! Mr. Malfoy, and unless I'm much mistaken I believe that is Misters Farnsworth, Macmillan, Bragge, Belby, McPhail, and Wimple, alongside Madames Lufkin, Japes, Dagwood, Goshawk, and Worme. What can Hogwarts offer to its illustrious board of governors?"

It was enough to halt all breakfast conversation in the hall and direct everyone's attention to the group of people who evidently intended to put down roots for a while.

From the head of the group Lucius responded, "Well Headmaster, in light of recent events," There was a minor pause and everyone's focus temporarily centered on Harry, "There has been some concern amongst us that the safety standards of our school are somewhat lower than we had been led to believe. To that end, Headmaster, we have all decided to come and spend the remainder of the term here to oversee the procedures and speak with the students about any concerns they may have. As, I need not remind you, is our remit as governors for this fine institution."

The pompous man finished his little monologue with a flourish and a bow, which Harry noticed brought a wide smile to his addle-brained spawn across the hall from him. It took all of his willpower not to just bang his head into the table in front of him. He had just killed one giant snake, did there really have to be more of them coming in at him?

Back at the front of the hall Dumbledore tipped his head slightly, as if acknowledging the point, "Well we will obviously do everything we can to accommodate you, and I will say here and now for you that all students are to answer any of the governor's questions truthfully and respectfully while they are here, as well as assisting them all as much as they can," turning his focus back to the men and women at the other end of the hall he continued, saying, "If I may be so bold, will you all like to reside in your former houses?"

He was met with a chorus of nods performed without rhyme or tempo, and in acknowledgement he went on, "Excellent, then I'll have the elves move your things to your rooms, you may call upon them at your leisure to be guided to your places, and if I may yet again impose on you all so, feel free to sit at the tables of your former houses that the students may learn just a bit more about their new housemates."

Lucius' face darkened at the mention of house elves, and darkened just a hair further when he was so kindly assigned a seat. Harry didn't miss the disappointment on the faces of the other governors, and he felt no small amount of satisfaction that not one of them ended up at the table of the loyal and diligent.

He held no illusions about why the governors were here, and if Dumbledore's minor wheeling and dealing just now were any indication, the bearded one didn't either. It probably had something to do with the fifteen separate letters he had received and not responded to from the group, and if the old man's help was any indication he probably had his own hopes along the same lines.

The basilisk that had almost claimed his life was evidently worth something like double its weight in gold. From the intact corneas (evidently an extra rarity, since the usual tactic for killing them was to blind them first) to the skin, the basilisk was composed entirely of exotic parts. Breeding them took so many certifications and permits from countries and organizations around the world that only about a score or so were harvested every decade. On top of which, the bastards only got more powerful as they aged.

Harry was sitting on top of something very much like forty tons of gold in the form of twenty tons of dead body. It wasn't like he didn't have financial security before he went off and nearly got a headstone that read 'He died the way he lived, hip deep in snake.', but it was still weird.

And of course the esteemed members of the Hogwarts Board of Governors all wanted a piece. The letters they had sent ranged from Lucius Malfoy's 'You killed a piece of Hogwarts history, you owe it to us', to Madame Japes' 'The Muggleborn Tuition Initiative could really use your help'.

Harry would feel worse about the whole deal, but for the fact that ministry law clearly stated killing a class five dangerous creature entitled you to the remains regardless of the creature's origin and his estates donated something like a few hundred million galleons annually to hospitals, orphanages, and so called 'Muggleborn Tuition Initiatives'. Harry was more than happy to dedicate as much as his financial advisors felt safe to helping the world. One of the upsides of it coming from a magical source was the fact that it could literally appear from nowhere in places the Goblins felt it was needed. Harry kept the file the Goblins sent him detailing the ins and outs of their work as a pick-me-up for days when he was feeling bad.

The organizations he gave to even spent the majority of their money on their stated cause too, what with Goblins being both thorough and litigious.

For the second or fourth time that day Harry found himself digressing. He was just doing anything he could to distract himself, because it was probably going to be a long few weeks.

Almost as that thought left whatever lips the voice in Harry's head possessed, an owl bearing the crest of Gringotts floated down from the roof of the hall alongside the rest of the day's mail. Floating on the gentle thermals spelled into the ceiling, the owl bore down on Harry in a way that made lesser predators envious and mice nervous.

Harry was channeling a mouse as it came close to him though. He had a number of operations running through Gringotts at the moment, and despite the fact that the Goblins liked him, he couldn't help but feel nervous.

Slitting open the envelope and opening the missive, Harry read the first few lines. And sighed. And actually did bang his head on the table this time.

Nym immediately reached for the mail, only to have her hand slapped away by Susan's as she beat her to the punch.

"Dah dah dah," she said in a low voice as she perused the paper, "something something, 'Your presence is required as soon as possible in light of the re-opening of an account thought lost in the year nineteen hundred forty three... dah dah dah... latest developments in Goblin legal precognition necessitates your involvement personally... something about basilisk eyeballs... a French fashion house has bought most of the skin for _how many zeroes is that! _", Susan folded out a small section of paper from the letter that had been placed there simply for the number not to carry to the next line, "oh, and their monitors have detected a change in your magical signature of all things, and they need you to go in to have some new keys made."

"Wow," the pink haired girl to Harry's right said, "Maybe Harry had it right."

His only response was to thunk his head against the table again.

The Gringotts owl dropped its haughty pose now that it felt its message was delivered, and chose to instead go directly for the bacon that its target's head thunking had knocked from his plate.

* * *

><p>Amelia consented to guide Harry to Gringotts on the weekend, and the weekend only.<p>

Harry honestly couldn't tell if it was because she was planning on arranging a guard for him or if she was attempting to punish him. Really either way it added up to the same thing, so it was eventually dismissed. If he had a week, he had more immediate concerns.

The board of governors were taking their sojourn to Hogwarts as an opportunity to inspect a few classes and compare them to the classes they remembered from their own times in the halls of Hogwarts.

That was the official line anyway.

Realistically, they were following Harry around in classes and in a move designed to probably score points with him, they were commenting on his evident genius and doing foolish things like recommending he get more points.

Harry was actually sort of offended.

Not only did they dismiss accomplishments of his friends and family in comparison to his own, an unforgivable act as far as he was concerned, but they also thought that he was immature enough to be swayed by that kind of thing! So of course he had to go and take advantage of it.

Thursday the friends all had transfiguration. Well the friends minus Luna. Who for some reason Harry was beginning to acutely feel the absence of. But that was different. Anyhow.

McGonagall was working the kids through what was known among the students as Hufflepuff day, but known to their somewhat surly teacher as badgering. It was time to learn the cauldron to badger transfiguration, and it was the lesson known for being one of the most troublesome of the year. After all, everyone's friends and some of their enemies wanted to be a badger at least once and if you've got a spell that can do it why not help them a bit.

Harry really just couldn't figure a lot of the things they learned out. Charms made a lot of sense usually, what with things needing to be lifted, made blue, cleaned, and the like, but these transfigurations were barmy at best. Who in the world, in the infinite history of weirdness and stupidity that wizards had, ran into a situation where they found themselves with too many cauldrons, but not enough badgers?

The incantation took from the Irish tradition, _bropota_, and in some ways Harry found that to answer the question why. Only the Irish. For the purpose of Harry's impromptu lesson to the board of governors however, the spell of the day could not have been better.

Badgers, as it happened, were not dissimilar to bludgers. Starting with 'B', ending with 'er', they shared similar colors, relative sizes, and when angered dealt similar levels of damage. Cauldrons being made of metal and sharing a general shape certainly didn't hurt the exercise at all. The substitution was begging to be made, and with a bit of a lisp on the 't', a flick where a twist should have been, and a different focus, the classroom should get a lot more interesting.

Harry had come up with his plan between notes on the theory behind changing pewter into a small furry mammal. As soon as the stern Scot let them off to do the practical alone, Harry figured he could get the spell off a few times in the direction of the professor's pile of cauldrons under the guise of figuring out the wand motion with Neville. The governors would hopefully get a taste of dobby the house elf's best and he would get to laugh from underneath his desk.

What he had not figured on was his magic going wonky at the exact moment he pointed his wand at the pile of cauldrons.

For a moment it felt like his arm was dipped in basilisk venom again, but it was just a flash. Enough to light up every nerve in his arm like the bang and purple smoke of a wizarding camera, but as soon as his brain got the message and considered cutting the arm off to get rid of the pain, it was gone. He couldn't help but gasp and clutch his arm to his chest, Neville on his right and Susan on his left both looking to him to see what was wrong.

All three of them lost their focus just long enough for the shoulder high pile of cauldrons to all pull into themselves and become iron balls with attitude issues. If he had been watching, Harry would have gulped and wished for a larger classroom with more cover. In his absence Nym grabbed Hermione's arm in a white knuckled grip and between the two of them they managed to hit the same points Harry's mind would have.

From the front of the room there was an explosion of motion. A cauldron for every student added up to twenty five bludgers, and of those twenty five fully fifteen headed directly for the back of the classroom where six haughty old people were trying to figure out how to impress a twelve year old, and one person was considering the murder of the same.

In the first fifteen seconds Lucius Malfoy took a bludger to the solar plexus and the groin, resulting in an interesting squeeing noise that would have induced laughter in the children had it not been drowned out by a chorus of 'Dear God Why!?'

At his side Cressida Dagwood screeched like a barn owl. Her family had made its money and gained its reputation from the potions and alchemy trades back in the day, consequently her skills with a wand had somewhat lagged behind in her education as she focused on the family business. A bludger swooped in front of her, crossing just centimeters in front of her nose, and suddenly her wand joined the flying objects in the room.

Gayle Japes, Miranda Goshawk, and Claudia Worme were somewhat less fortunate, though after but a moment no more armed. A trio of bludgers collected behind the ladies, and began sharply impacting their bums, somehow making the impact noises one would expect of a bare bottom spanking despite the layers of robes covering the ladies buttocks. Almost as one, the ladies threw their arms in the air and cried out. As the rogue bludgers continued their humiliating work, the ladies screams joined the cacophony in the air and they began racing around the room trying to outrun the flying metal.

Festus Belby, best known for being related to the inventor of the wolfsbane potion, was a dour man at the best of times. When faced with a room of children hiding beneath desks, fellow board members being brought to their knees and sprinting hither and yon for fear of buttock based damage, he did the only thing left to a man in that position, he doubled over in laughter and managed to largely escape the floating anger balls.

His companion for the moment, Gilbert Wimple, was not so fortunate. Wimple worked under the auspices of the committee for experimental charms when he wasn't attending to his duties on the board. He managed to miss the first round of attacks on the folks at the back of the room, but it was purely accidental as he was mostly stupefied by the apparent transfiguration of a pile of cauldrons into what were normally heavily enchanted objects. He had, in his work, seen charmed objects transfigured, and seen transfigured objects charmed. He had never seen the process go together in one apparent step, and as his body seized while his mind tried to cope with the idea, he narrowly missed the bludgers that grazed him in an apparent attempt to scare or disorient him.

His mystified stare did not last him long enough, however, as he soon joined the ladies in their running and screaming. Intellectual curiosity took a back seat, it seemed, when there was metal faffing about with the intent to injure.

Five bludgers forced Minerva beneath her desk, their swiping fly-bys threatening her wand hand as she tried to snap _finite_s out at the flying menace. Another five swooped about the desk in the classroom, keeping the children thoroughly cowed.

All in all, it was bedlam, and when Harry recovered from his momentary shock enough to begin to appreciate what was happening around him, he couldn't help but feel rather proud of himself.

* * *

><p>During the remainder of the week Harry managed to keep his streak of weirdness up. Lucius was a wonderful target, the platinum blonde hair not only stood out, but his son was just so obnoxious it was hard for everyone to not want to punch Malfoy senior for reproducing.<p>

While the others from the board either looked on or participated, Lucius found himself with shoes animated and set to eat one another. His hair was briefly filled with dragon dung fertilizer, and with a lot of careful misdirection, Harry managed to consistently blind the man and his fellows with tanning charms whenever Lockhart smiled in class.

It was kind of great, and after the fourth or fifth class interruption on the part of the board members, even Hermione had to admit that they seemed to deserve it. Or perhaps she just fell victim to the humor in watching a grown man stomp his foot and nearly break out into tears because a biting ficus tossed mulch at him.

Amelia picked him up from the great Hall, and as soon as they got out past the ward line they pair aparated straight to the steps of Gringotts. Harry felt his questions from earlier in the week were answered when a few different people in the general Diagon alley crowd immediately went from looking at them as they arrived to scanning the crowds around them. It was a little subtler than the traditional brown trench coats the aurors tended to favor, but when the five most dangerous people in a crowd suddenly have their backs to you, with several appearing to subvocalize some kind of speech to one another despite the distance, even Harry could put the facts together.

The mother and son walked up the white marble step to the bank, and with a brief glance at the words on the door and bow to the guards on duty beside it, they headed inside. Master Rel's office was in the same place as always, to the hall down the right, but out of courtesy they waited at a teller to be led in.

As they entered his office, the short creature looked up, and with a smile born of the profit Harry alone had garnered for his clan, he bade greeting to them, "And how are you this day, Bones?"

Harry and Amelia spoke as one, "Decent enough/Very well, thanks you."

The Goblin readied his paperwork and opened several drawers evidently looking for something as he responded, "Good good good!"

With some minor grumbling, Rel caught whatever beast he hunted for, and with an "Ah!" he placed a small golden key on his desk.

"I'm afraid today is not all good news. In light of this I will give you a choice not all of our clients receive. The good news, the bad news, or the weird news, honored customer?"

Getting the option of good or bad news was actually a bit of a coup for a human in Gringotts, but as Harry met his mother's gaze, they both knew their preference.

"Good first, please," Harry said, sitting forward in his chair.

"Good I can do. Let me see here. You've seen the profit reports for the sale so far of the basilisk parts you have provided, at the standard processing fee of five percent you alone have paid the expenses of my department, along with providing our lord with what he claims is the most succulent steak he has ever had the pleasure to consume. On top of this, I must tell you that we have prepared and preserved the eyeballs and ocular nerves of the basilisk for you. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the eyestalk of the beast you have killed is one of the most magically potent pieces of any creature Gringotts has ever processed. To be honest, we're not even certain what could be done with it, but we have preserved them in your vault against future need and have not elected to sell them on the open market."

Rel looked at them with raised brows from over his spectacles. In the name of diplomacy and not being disemboweled, Harry had to summon all of his willpower to not begin humming the theme to the Muppet show. As they nodded their agreement, Rel continued.

"Atop the already immense fortune you have acquired this quarter, I have more good news that edges into weird. We have already preformed an inheritance ritual for you, and at the time you'll recall that you showed no connection to the Slytherin line, yes?"

Amelia eyebrows rose skyward, and Harry wondered what Rel's reaction would be to Harry banging his head on his desk.

Amelia decided to take this one, "Slytherin?"

"Indeed."

"No, Harry wasn't related to any Slytherin. We looked up his pedigree too, not even through some kind of cadet branch or a squib line."

"Well, I do not have an explanation for this, but the Slytherin vault has been re-activated. We have monitors in place on the old family vaults. In the event of the family dying out, the vaults are designed to lock down forever. It was an old security feature designed in times of war, I'm afraid. Our monitors have recorded the vault security spells reactivating and preparing themselves for business. Our diagnostic have connected this development to young Harry's evolving magical signature."

Harry and Amelia both had expected some things from this visit, the profit from the snake (Amelia had nearly told him that he needed to save for his future, but she recalled that the boy was one of the most wealthy individuals in the world) was going to be a topic, they expected a news update on their Sirius efforts, and then something with Harry's magical signature.

The vault established for the line of Salazar Slytherin was a bit of a long shot.

Rel noticed their difficulty in understanding, and so continued, "As best we can tell, there are a few possibilities for explanations. It may be that Mr. Bones defeating the familiar of Slytherin granted him access. This explanation has a large number of holes in it, but we believe it's one of the better ones. The vault was originally closed in 1943 when our sensors recorded some form of fatal damage to the life and magic of the last of Slytherin's line. It is possible that the snake caused this destruction, and your killing of it allows you access. It may also just be Mr. Bones' signature changing. It may have reset the sensors in the vault enough for them to recognize your defeat of the former dark lord, who often claimed to be the Heir of Slytherin."

Amelia was just nodding along and gesturing for the Goblin to continue, Harry was wondering about his life.

Rel continued.

"In any event, the result of it all is that we believe that Harry now has access to the vault of the Slytherin family. Their holdings and liquid assets all come to something like one hundred galleons fifty knuts. The only thing of significant value they possessed is the collected library of Salazar Slytherin. After our business is concluded, we'll see about your access. Unless you have any questions, I'll transition to the weird."

The humans shook their heads.

"Very well. We Goblins have spent several lifetimes studying wizarding magical signatures. Given you metamorphmagi, polyjuice potions, cosmetic charms, and the thousands of other ways you human conceal yourselves, your magical signatures typically remain nearly unchanged through your entire lives. Such a recognition system form one layer of the security we keep around your vaults. Around the time we now recognize your fight with the basilisk having taken place in, our monitors caught a significant change in the signature we have associated with you, Mr. Bones."

"What does that mean? We've made a bit of a study of it ourselves, it's what makes up our monitoring network for unlicensed operation, portkeys, and the like. I'm not sure we've ever recorded a significant shift in one."

"Again, Ms. Bones, I'm afraid I must answer that we don't know. Mr. Bones here is unique. In fact almost entirely unique. From his biology down to the magical influences in his life, we can honestly say that he simply has no parallel that we may draw lines to. This is part of why we have asked you in today. Mr. Bones," the Goblin said, refocusing on the boy, "Can you offer any insight?"

Harry shifted somewhat uncomfortably, "I'm not sure. My magic has been going mad lately. It's probably related. I've been feeling like I'm doing accidental magic again. I _may_ have, in theory, attempted to send an itching hex at the roots of a biting ficus while Lucius Malfoy was near, and accidentally hit the root system of every ficus around him. I've been doing little things all week to annoy those stupid board of governor people who are trying to suck up to me, and it's all just been screwy."

"And it had been like this since you fought the basilisk?"

"Yeah. All I can think of is that I still kinda have basilisk in me. The healers couldn't get me any form of anti-venom that had any effect. Hedwig practically bathed me in her tears to make sure I was okay, and I think I may still have a piece of bone embedded in my hip. The problem is that unique biology thing. I'm a little too weird for almost any healer to compensate for. I mean I don't even have a heart like either of you two."

Rel seemed to pause and consider this for a moment, Amelia also took a second to figure things out for herself. How did she get herself into these things? You help one orphan and then everything goes crazy on you forever. At least the kid went nuts on Christmas.

"Mr. Bones, Ms. Bones, allow me to call in a Goblin diagnostician. With a few fast scans I believe we may find the cause of this issue, as well as get our monitors re-tuned to you."

With their assent, Rel pulled a drawer from his desk and touched what appeared to be a Goblin rune on the inside of it. In moments a Goblin wearing slacks and a standard white lab coat entered. Its hair was shockingly white and sticking up all over the place, and as the Goblin entered it was continually muttering to itself in gobbledygook.

"You'll have to forgive us, our warders and magical diagnosticians are some of the best in the world, but delving as deep into their fields as they do does tend to make the strongest of souls go just a bit mad."

The mad scientist Goblin was standing beside Rel's desk and muttering to himself. At a few of his long fingered gestures, colors seemed to seep from Harry's body and for a perfect replica of himself sitting outside of his body a few feet to his right.

At another gesture, the illusory Harry lost his skin and muscles, leaving the room to gaze at Harry's bones and blood vessels. The Goblin with the wild hair seemed to growl at the sight, and the colors changed. Little glints of green and red appeared inside his blood vessels, like small current of emerald and ruby dust.

The Goblin swiped at the picture of harry and the illusion of his veins disappear as the fake harry stood and rotated on the spot, his hip becoming the central focus. Right in his hip where he had been stabbed by a basilisk rib there was a small jade green and pure white fire.

Harry and Amelia both looked on, just absorbing more to add to the books they would later write about Harry's life.

The Goblin conjured a small metallic plate, and using a nail from his hand scratched a few runes onto it. He handed the plate to Harry and turned to Rel, "Nar'kel ushur groborak. Dan kesh bur ogorad. Vel'shem."

Rel just smiled and shook his head, "English, these are honored guests."

The strange Goblin turned and looked queerly at Harry and Amelia. Gritting his pointed teeth like it was an effort, he managed to choke out in a gravelly voice, "Have snake bone fused to your bone. Firebird tears make safe. Bone makes immune to snake. Blood filled with venom. Keep plate near thigh, takes venom. Blood made safer, venom too rare to just sit around in blood."

Rel's smile widened, "Thank you, you may go."

The other Goblin passed a hand through his unruly hair and began muttering to himself again as he walked out, slamming the door behind him.

"We do try to socialize them where we can. Nice fellow usually. Now any questions?"

Harry and Amelia were both looking at the plate and looking at his hip, as if trying to see the blood and basilisk venom that apparently filled his veins. It did kind of explain why all of the healers he saw were pretty keen on the idea that Harry should be dead.

"Well, now I'm afraid that we must transition from weird into bad. We have determined that without outside intervention, Sirius Black will die before his case will make it to open court. With one of our best legal teams being able to make no headway despite the now over a year you have given us, one member of the Lawyer clan got incredibly drunk and paid for time to consult one of our seers. She was able to confer this knowledge to him, along with an assurance that despite this, Sirius Black will not die in jail."

Harry took his mum's hand. Sirius was even more important to her than he was to Harry.

"We have no timescale, but our seers are not considered to be so unless their insight is correct more than eighty seven times out of one hundred. Gringotts assures you, your fiancé and godfather will be free, we have simply hit the end of our resources legally. We had taken our normal retainer for the duration of our services, but for the fact that we were not able to make headway, and for the fact that your case has fairly revolutionized how we will handle these cases in the future, we have elected to waive the four thousand galleon case fee."

Rel gave them a moment to collect themselves, "On a personal note, I am sorry that this is how this is working out, but I urge you both to take heart from the fact that he will be out, and he will not die in that place."

* * *

><p>[AN]: Runecutter! The fellow's been giving me excellent advice for ages about this stuff I write, and he was kind enough to help me figure out everyone on the board of governors. He spent hours coming up with some excellent ideas and without him I'd just have a bunch of arbitrary old minister of magic names with no ideas or back stories. So kudos dude, thanks!


	30. Chapter 28: The Revenge of Chapter 27

Chapter 28: The Revenge of Chapter 27

"It is at this stage that I would like to reemphasize three things I have said for our valued customers," Rel said, ensuring he made eye contact with the two humans in front of him, "Gringotts has reached the edge of what we are able to do _legally_. Our seers have seen that _unassisted_ Sirius Black will die in jail before any legal recourse may be used to save him. Our seers have seen that he _will not_ die in jail. Have I made myself clear on these aspects of our business?"

Amelia's eye narrowed. For the same reason she was wary when she brought Harry and the rest of the kids in their first time, she was nervous now. Centuries of treaties dictated the what, where, when, and how often of human Goblin relations. For the most part those treaties had gone the Goblin's way, but that was neither here nor there.

If she was picking up what Rel was putting down, this could be a few different brands of trouble. Trouble of a slightly higher grade than even Harry got up to.

Amelia cleared her throat, and very distinctly not making eye contact she said, "I'm sure I have no idea what you're talking about Master Rel."

What she missed was Harry making eye contact with the Goblin and a slow nod being exchanged

"Very well, then I believe the manticore's share of our business is concluded. I have one parting recommendation before I release you both to find your fortune in Slytherin's vault. Given the extent to which Mr. Bones' magical signature has changed, you may consider looking into a new wand for him. We are not legally allowed such things, but as we have seen from our customers, when a change in magical signature is detected, a withdrawal for the purchase of a new wand often occurs."

Amelia stood and dusted off her pants in a distracted motion, "Our sincerest thanks for your attention and patience in dealing with our business, Master Rel."

"It is my pleasure, Miss and mister Bones."

* * *

><p>The Slytherin vault was almost exactly what Harry expected.<p>

Dark.

Dingy.

Disused.

Filled with the queer smell of mold aged so long it died of natural causes.

There was a small pile of gold coins in the center of the vault, and the vault ledger showed it was either from or to a person with the initials HS. The ledger turned out to be the cause of the dead mold smell, which left a lot to be desired by all parties.

Amelia and Harry split up to canvass the smattering of bookshelves, each filled with books aged so much that the gilded covers seemed to have decayed to nothing. Amelia made sure to admonish Harry to touch nothing, and Harry made sure to make the proper responses and noise that his mother was looking for.

Passing along the shelves, some of the books seemed to catch Harry's eye. If he looked from the corner of his vision, he seemed to catch books that were in pristine condition, but his direct attention only revealed a barely constrained stack of papers. It was some kind of charm, but without actively casting magic on it (a bit of a no no in Goblin territory) Harry was stuck to trying to read titles out of the corner of his eye.

He moved farther back to the stack farthest from the door and resumed his strategy, when it hit him that the leftmost book on the top shelf was actually legible and in good condition on its own. What was more, in a text that seemed to wiggle and move in front of his eyes, Harry could make out the title.

'Read Me First, You Twit'

What the hell was with Hogwarts founders and calling him names?

Looking around himself to ensure his mum wasn't actively looking at him, he snagged the book and secreted it into one of his space expanded pockets. As long as he could get it past his mum he had all the time in the world to make sure it wouldn't blow up on him, or bite him or something.

When his mum finally called his name, Harry affirmed that he hadn't found anything decent, and the pair headed back up to the surface.

* * *

><p>"Ollivanders then?"<p>

Harry started, "Sorry, I was miles away, what's up?"

"I said should we go to Ollivanders then, you silly boy."

"MuuuUUUm."

"That's a yes then, let's go figure out why you're going all more crazy than usual on me."

Amelia pulled Harry by the arm from where he was standing at the top of the steps to Gringotts. She had taken a moment to talk to one of the escorts she had arranged while Harry stared off into the crowd, watching the random movements of the people and trying to gain some kind of universal wisdom from them. Or he was considering what Hogwarts had on offer for dinner. With Harry it was a real toss-up.

As they entered the decrepit old shop Ollivander seemed to forgo his usual theatrics, and merely appeared behind the counter. Amelia stood forward and with the skill she had used to gain her position in the first place said, "You expected us."

The old man nodded his head, he was just as pale and skeletal as he had been when Harry and Susan had gone for their wands, and just the same as he had been when Amelia herself had gone for hers.

Somehow his voice still sounded like it came from a man a hundred years his junior, "I did. I almost thought I would see you two here sooner, but no. Today is the day. Now for the important question," Ollivander switched his attention from the woman to the boy, "Do _you_ know why you're here?"

Harry felt like shifting under the ancient man's gaze, but resisted the urge, "I'm here because my magic's gone all sideways on me, the Goblins recommended I come see you."

Ollivander's gaze did not shift, "But that's not the whole story, is it? You suspect, but do not know, hmm?"

Harry did shift under the gaze now, it had become uncomfortable, especially because Ollivander had yet to blink in their presence.

"I will tell you a tale, Mr. Bones, and then we'll see what we see, hmm? Do you know why we use wands? Why all of us use wands? It's one of the constants, you see. From Atlantis to ancient Egypt to the Icelandic fjords, the style may change, but the wand remains the same. A piece of a magical creature encased in magically resonant plant, held in contact with the skin and cast through. But why?"

Ollivander stood from his stool behind the counter, his back bent with age, and with slow but steady steps he went to one of his shelves and pulled out a single wand from its box, "Magic does not exist in a void, you see. They say no man is an island, they say it because no man could ever exist in a void either. Even those that reject society and live in only their own company are still defined by that which they reject. They are anti-society, a definition still marked by society. Magic seeks magic, Mr. Bones."

Ollivander gave the wand a twirl between his long fingers, the soft brown of the wood standing out strikingly from between the gnarled joints of the wandmaker's hand.

"We all have magic within ourselves, it rests somewhere between the mind, the body, and the soul. But this magic is only ours. You are a metamorphmagus, Mr. Bones, you are closer to that magic than almost anyone else. You change yourself by bending the magic inside yourself. You ask it, you persuade it to make you taller, to make you stronger, and it responds. Magic outside the body is different and yet the same. To affect more than yourself, to project magic outside yourself, you cannot be an island. Macro-magic, magic in the wider world, exists much like electricity. It is a potential difference between two things. It is internal magic interacting with her ten inches of heartstring from a particularly spunky Catalonian fireball that lets her cast her _tempus_ charm. That is how it is different."

Amelia looked guiltily at the others for checking the time during the lecture. Ollivander smiled in response and cast his own, the smoking letters spelling out the date glowed a little brighter floating over his wand than they did over Amelia's.

"It is the same because magic outside our bodies and outside our minds and souls is no less an act of _persuasion_. We cast a stunner, and it is a packet of energy sent from us to our target with the express intent of persuading their internal magic to put them out of commission. A being with strong enough internal magic would ignore that packet of intent, but alas most do not. We cast a levitation spell, and we persuade the rock to fly. Too big of a rock, and our persuasion may not be enough. Too magical a rock, our persuasion may be resisted. Warding, enchanting, and many more, all of our disciplines can be boiled down to using our magic with the magic of our wands to convince something to do what we want."

"Do you see the connection now, Mr. Bones? Is it beginning to make sense?"

Harry looked down and tried to work out the meaning behind Ollivander's words. Magic needed a connection to work in the greater world. It needed to interact between two different things, Hermione and her dragon heartstring, Susan and her unicorn hair. He had Augury feathers. If he wanted maybe he had a basilisk ocular nerve in his vault. It worked by using the difference between these magics to throw itself into the outside world, carrying just a bit of their intent.

"I see you haven't quite gotten there yet, but you're so close," Ollivander was getting visibly more excited, but still had yet to blink once while they were there, "Let me attempt a different tact. Do you know of the Picts? The clans of native Scots that opposed the Roman invasions of our dear Britain? Their warriors went to war wearing nothing but woad, a plant based pigment that was mixed with the blood of trolls. They believe their paints were their armor, and for the work of a few primitive potioneers, it was. It functioned well against the Romans until their mages found a way around the magic leading to their eventual downfall. That was magic outside their bodies, was it not? A similar tale may be told of the Indian people. Some Indian women wear a dot of vermillion powder mixed with just a few drops of Occamy blood on their forehead, it is called a bindi. They have been known to cast some mind affecting spells using this bindi, many claim with greater strength than they could from what we would consider a traditional wand, by virtue of the bindi marking and channeling what they believe to be the location of the sixth chakra. Now to put you on the correct path I must ask, are these not macro-magics? Do these 'not wands' cast spells as we would with our wands?"

Ollivander's examples didn't set Harry off in a new direction, but they did refine his navigation so to speak. It wasn't the wand that was important, it wasn't the wood either, it was the difference he had talked about. The difference in magical potential between the Picts and the troll blood, and the Indian women and the Occamy blood.

If that was true then, what was throwing him off? He didn't have blood on him. At least not since his fifth shower, that basilisk blood really just got everywhe-

The Basilisk.

Ollivander smiled as comprehension dawned on Harry's face. Harry had a source of different magical potential, and he had it not in a bit of paint on him or in a stick in his hand, he had it _in_ him. The basilisk venom coursing through his bloodstream at that very moment was acting as a second source of magical potential. The bit of bone that had embedded into his had interacted with his magic not to make the venom less potent or to remove it from his system, instead it rendered him immune to its effects. It probably was even producing some of the poison! Harry's eyes widened and he looked up at Ollivander whose satisfaction was complete.

"Yes, Mr. Bones. You understand now. It is no wonder you have been having overactive magic, or even 'accidental magic' happen. You, your body, your very blood is acting as a wand would. One might even go so far as to say you are one of the first to ever be capable of 'wandless' magic. For one in your position this is a great gift. You may never be disarmed, and you may never be without the means to protect yourself or others."

Amelia still looked confused as all get out, she stood behind Harry with a somewhat dazed look in her eyes. Harry turned to her to confirm his suspicions and to tell her what he had, what he was!

He paused though when he saw her eyes, and with a somewhat hostile and questioning expression he turned back to the aged wandcrafter.

"What you have pieced together Mr. Bones, is a rare thing. It is my suspicion that you have suffered greatly for this gift. It is also my suspicion that you will use it well. Before your anger extends too far, let me say this. Your mother is a good and principled woman. She is a woman of the law. I would offer you, in this case, a mild _confundus. _It is perhaps just a bit better if this a secret you hold a little closer to your vest. Before too long you will be called upon to do things it were better your wand not be connected to, and for her sake maybe it would be better that this conversation should never have happened."

Ollivander had yet to do anything, even historically if Harry recalled correctly, that would indicate he could not be trusted. So Harry paused, and he thought. Assuming he had not misinterpreted what Master Rel had been trying to communicate, he would likely have a lot that he needed to keep from his mum soon. Even beyond his half formed ideas on that topic, the old man's words rang true from part of himself hidden deep inside.

Looking back up, he reconnected to Garrick Ollivander's unblinking gaze, and Harry nodded.

"I had hoped that you might see things in that light."

Ollivander walked over to where he had picked up a wand from his shelves and replaced it there, and in his stooped gait made his way back to what seemed to be a stool behind his counter. Deliberately catching Harry's eye the old man blinked, and Amelia's hand came down on his shoulder.

"C'mon kiddo, I think he's solved your problem, now we gotta get you back to school."

Harry startled, and seeing the old man now definitely wink at him he turned and made to leave with his mum, dragging his feet slightly on the way.

"Can we stop at Fortescue's on the way back?"

"Oh you just want to not have to go back to school so soon."

"What's your point?"

As Amelia held the door open for her young charge she seemed to actually weigh his words for a moment.

"Well fine, but you scared a decade off my life and sold a snake carcass for enough money to run a small country, so you're paying."

"I'd say something like you're the adult and it's your job, but I kinda still feel like I got off easy on that one."

* * *

><p>The Hogwarts board of governors kept up their inspection well past the month of May and into June, to Harry and his friend's disgust. All told it was rather becoming a group disgust from nearly everyone in their year. It seemed that a lot of the Ravens were offended that they weren't being recognized nearly as often as Harry was for their intellects, and the snakes felt a similar offense. The lions just seemed kind of offended in general, though that may have just been a Ron Weasley thing.<p>

And as if the general classroom discontent weren't enough, the group of old people saw fit to invite Harry to a nearly endless deluge of meaningless dinners, lunches, tea times, and at one point formal ball. Hermione had first brought it up as a joke, but the whole thing would have been a lot less of an issue if the whole group didn't seem to suffer from what she called 'Trust Fund Kids Disease'.

While Lucius Malfoy was at the very least up front about his desire to see Harry injured or crushed beneath his heel, the others were so wrapped inside their own little worlds that their attempts to sway Harry into donating money from the sale of the basilisk carcass were so painful it was hardly worth mentioning.

Cressidia Dagwood's invitations to one on one dinners and tea times all struck Harry as being more than a little... seductive. Which was confusing and kinda gross. The woman dressed constantly in low cut gowns beneath interestingly cut robes, the result of which was an often furious Nym and a confused feeling Harry. He may have been entering a stage of his life where that would begin to interest him, but on a woman older than his biological mum would be were she still alive, the poor boy was fairly settled on how he felt about it. Her invitations were rarely returned.

Mirada Goshawk came the closest to actually getting money, if only by virtue of the fact that Harry very nearly believed her when she said the money would go into further spell research and refinement for her legendary works, The Standard Book of Spells, Grades 1-7. Her execution was weirdly antagonistic though, and she talked so far down to Harry he just couldn't stand her, even setting her obvious blood prejudice tendencies aside.

Gayle Japes and Claudia Worme both seemed like they would spend any donations they received on smoking some of Snape's miracle herb and painting, regardless of what they said it was for.

Festus Belby acted a lot like what Harry had read of Horace Slughorn from his folk's journals, but where Slughorn seemed like he was good at his whole 'Slug Club' nonsense, Belby seemed to be more of a wishful thinker. Well that, and the fact that Harry had never heard of a single person whose influence he claimed to peddle.

H.E. Farnsworth was just genuinely insane. That was all there was to it. He claimed he intended to use the money on the construction of 'a giant atomic monster with freeway on-ramps for arms, and a heart as black as coal'. He was the best of the rest of the lot.

Harry had almost never been gladder to be in Hufflepuff. His uncomfortableness with the board was very visible, and the other badgers even outside his friends all caught on enough to start running interference for him. Even Ernie Macmillian, who was a renowned self-important git most of the time, proved willing to distract and delay his great uncle for Harry.

He had never felt so touched by these folks, and he was going to inflate the economy of wizarding Britain next Christmas, he was sure.

Alongside the attentions of the Board of governors though, his cat was let firmly out of the bag to the public. Were the pictures and posters of him triumphant that afternoon not enough, the newspapers had gone through ministry records, attempted to bribe Gringotts employees, and just plain made things up in an attempt to get his full story. Amelia had covered the records of his more unfortunate past well inside the unfortunately small Department of Wizarding Child Services, but after everything that had happened the name Harry Bones was well and truly on many people's lips. To Harry's mixed chagrin and rage, often preceded by Harry Potter.

The puffers stood beside him, and so far no one had broken ranks and let out if he was a boxers or briefs kind of man, if he snored, and what brand of hair conditioning potion he preferred. Again, Harry felt like he could kiss the lot of them.

But his efforts, the efforts of his fellow Hufflepuffs, the concentrated efforts of his friends and family, and the efforts of the few members of the Goblin lawyer clan he kept on retainer in the event of wild slander and libel, all went to naught in driving off the owls.

Parents who were thankful their children had been saved, girls, women, and a surprising number of titled Ladies who were curious of his current marital status, companies after endorsements, and hate mail from members of Magicals for Ethical Animal Treatment. Harry was getting owls by the parliament, and if he weren't so close with Griffy and his other friends down in the kitchen, he honestly didn't know how he would have handled it.

One of the elves that had been previously just been assigned to taking care of the owls and the owlery (Harry suspected she spent a lot of time petting the owls, the little lady could put Hagrid's creature obsession to shame) offered to look after Harry's mail, and the diminutive creature had never looked more overworked or happier. Flappy, as she was known, left him all of his safe mail in a massive cardboard box she had found somewhere. Which Harry very nearly questioned, as he had never seen cardboard in the magical world to that point, before writing it off. He felt special too, Flappy was one of the most anti-social elves Harry had ever met. Other elves interceded for her when anyone had specific owl requirements, because she refused to speak to anything not avian or elven.

Harry did his best to pick through the lot of his mail, and send at least a few polite replies to some of the people, but his enthusiasm for anything regarding the fan mail died a nasty and violent death the day that Lockhart had found him reading a piece at breakfast and offered his services as an expert celebrity.

Sadly it was June eighth, when the whole school was in final preparations for the end of the term and the beginning of summer, when another one of the owl caretakers appeared in the Hufflepuff second year dorm and invited Harry up to speak with Flappy.

When he arrived he found her in the back corner of the owlery, petting a beautiful screech owl's chest feathers and cooing to it delicately. Harry knew she didn't like to be interrupted (elves were shameless gossips) so when he entered and saw her he cleared his throat and got her attention. She turned to him, releasing the owl to head into the rafters, curling one of her long ears around her finger, the elf couldn't quite meet Harry's eyes, "Bonesy? So I's be getting your mail since you gone and killed the big snakey-"

Harry couldn't help but interrupt, crouching down next to her and putting a hand on her shoulder, "And I'd be lost completely without you, Flappy, you've been brilliant."

"Well I's not being all truthy with you. You's been getting a lot more mail than what I gives you," She said, giving her ear a bit of a twist, "But all the mails I don't give you being from bad peoples!"

"What do you mean?"

"Well..." the little elf said, scraping a toe on the stone at her feet, "Some people be sending you nasty love potionses. A few of the peoples who are liking the animals send you mail with buttoblubber pusses, and-"

"Bubotuber pus?"

"Thats what Flappy is saying, yes, and a lot of girls be sending you bad pictures of them or pieces of their underwears, and Flappy saves all of these up because they are bad and you don't need them."

The poor little elf finished with a bit of a grimace, and seemed to be twisting her ear a bit in a painful manner. Harry took her hands in his.

"You did well, Flappy. I couldn't have asked you to do any better even if I had known. You saved me from all of the bad stuff exactly like I would have asked you to if I had been thinking in the slightest, you're a good elf," he said with a smile, "Do you have all the bad mail? Just so I can give it to my mum?"

"Missus Bonesy can make them stops their bad mail?"

"I certainly hope so, most of that is illegal and a lot of it is creepy."

The elf looked slightly guiltier than before and refused to meet Harry's eyes again, her voice carried a surprising amount of vehemence for a creature so small, "Good. Flappy does not like to touch underthings. Underthings are gross. Weird potions even more gross. Flappy likes owls."

If she weren't such a gentle person, Harry would have sworn that her statement would have ended in 'Dammit!'

"Flappy is giving these to you, and then we is never going to talk about this again, okay?"

"Flappy, my mum might have questions or something about who this is from, or how this happened..."

"No," she said, shaking her head from side to side, causing her ears to flap against her head, "Flappy is helping you, yous being one of us, but Flappy is done with this. No more underthings! I's done with this! I see one more owl with underthings on it's head flying in and I goes to work with armor dusting crew!"

Harry took a half step back from the vehemence in her tone, "Okay, how about I direct all my mail back home? You seemed happy to help before, otherwise I wouldn't have bothered you."

"Bonesy, you is being one of us, we will always be helping you. I's just going to be freaking out if I see one more owl carrying box of bad potioned chocolate or carrying signed underthings! There's just being no dignity in it for poor owlses. Flappy be hating that."

Harry made sure to thank her, and took the huge bag she prepared for him with all of the 'bad potionses'. It was filled with vials of violently scarlet and pink substances, as well as what looked and smelled like half rotten pieces of chocolate that must have been laced with something. None of the vials looked particularly well cared for, or labeled, but Harry figured he should just be happy with what he got.

After his brief look through the bag, and at the still angry glare of Flappy, he got the hell out of there. Elves were nice folks and he loved'em, no two ways about that, but if they had even the slightest provocation they could be completely bat-shit insane and just a bit violent about it at that.

* * *

><p>Lucius Malfoy was having a bad day. Lucius Malfoy was having a bad week. Lucius Malfoy was-<p>

NO!

This is what Narcissa was always talking about, stop referring to yourself in the third person Lucius!

The head of house Malfoy sat on the miserable and uncomfortable chair in his miserable and uncomfortable rooms somewhere on the fourth floor of Hogwarts. Dumbledore had claimed that their arrival was so unexpected that the old Lord's quarters weren't ready for inhabitants, so they all had to make do with the guest quarters back behind one of the old DADA classrooms. To date he had sent his worthless house elf out to fetch his better chairs and more comfortable mattresses from the manor seven times, and each time he had gone to sit on or sleep on them he got up to find it had turned into a straight backed wooden chair, or woken up to find it had become a lumpy and old student's mattress.

He had even gone as far as transfiguring the entire room, then warding it against elves, switching spell, transfigurations, and even finishing spells. Of course he made the mistake of blinking when he finished, and the whole room reverted back to how it had been hours earlier. If he didn't know any better, he would swear the damn castle was playing with him.

And of course on top of his room, that stupid little Potter shit had to have a damn spine too. Any second year could stand up to the charms of the other eleven idiots, unless they were completely without a personality anyway, but the boy just had no personal weak spot he could attack. His mother was the head of the DMLE, his close friends were all from old pureblood lines, and even that other metamorph freak was the child of a St. Mungos healer.

Lucius shivered in his thinly padded wing backed chair.

One just did not antagonize healers. The last war had plenty enough reason why, the Crabbes and Goyles used to be among the Dark Lord's more inventive apothecarists after all. Used to being the operative phrase.

And then there was no word from any corner about the Dark Lord's diary. When he returned he would not be pleased.

AND THE LITTLE SHIT WOULD NOT EVEN GIVE HIM A PIECE OF THE CARCASS!

It was like there wasn't going to be any profit made off of this disaster. Every one of the Dark Lord's eventual prey had come out of the affair either uninjured or stronger, and of all things a twelve year old boy had survived alone against the monster of Slytherin himself, whatever that was.

At least the year was almost over. When the rest of the board finally gave up on their pathetic attempts to carve out their own portions of the profit, he could go back to his manor and managing his assets. Fudge did not like to come to Hogwarts after-all, so it was possible his influence had waned in the last month or so.

Lucius Malfoy was having a bad day. Lucius Malf- No! I. I need a drink. Let us- LET ME go see if Severus has anything fun brewed up. Whatever his 'amphetamine' is, it is amazing and we must see if we can get the recipe for Narcissa to brew.

With a cry of "Come, Dobby!" Lucius left his suite.

He routed himself across the hall and down one of the moving staircases. As he stepped on it, it began moving across the hallway, waylaying him further.

Lucius actually growled.

When it got in the right configuration, he headed to the stairs behind the tapestry curtain of Mummy the Magnificent (a tapestry, oddly enough, about the tale of a mythical mother rather than the tapestry celebrating the dark lord killing remains of first dynasty pharaoh, Hor-Aha) which led directly to a passage that came out behind a suit of armor in the entrance hall.

As he stepped towards the stair, he snapped his fingers impatiently at his side. Dobby immediately handed him his cloak to guard against the slight chill in the lower floors of Hogwarts, and they went onwards.

The tapestry was at the bottom of another staircase, one that lead up to the sixth level, bypassing the fifth entirely. As he got closer to it, he distinctly heard a clinking and clanking sound, alongside the voice of his nemesis for the last month.

"Great move, Potter," came the voice from the stairs, "Get a three stone bag of vials from the clutches of one elf, don't think of asking another to get it to mum. You're a bloody genius." The clinking sound got louder as the boy evidently shifted the bag on his shoulders.

Slowing his steps slightly, his custom made cane no longer struck the floor with a solid tap every other step. Lucius waited until he was just abreast of the crossing stairs, before sticking his cane out into the crossroads at ankle height just as the sound of footsteps closed with him.

At least he'd get some satisfaction from this.

In a trice he had tripped his target, sending Harry careening to the ground with what appeared to be a heavy burlap sack as well. However as raven hair and glinting green eyes crossed his vision, the moment became somewhat less amusing than Lucius had hoped.

Harry felt the end of a stick of some kind smack up against his ankle, and as his step went forward the stick caught against the edge of one of the paving stones underfoot and knocked him off balance. As he dropped the sack he carried to ensure the fall wouldn't break his nose, he began to see another aspect in the wisdom in letting an elf bring the stash of love and lust potions from his mail to his mum instead of insisting on doing it himself.

Hopefully Flappy was good enough to make sure all of the samples she took were in unbreakable vials?

The heavy bag fell away from his shoulder, and as he saw the person who had gone and tripped him, an idea popped into Harry's head. As he was in the middle of his fall, he shoved the bag away from him with his elbow, and focused on wanting, no, _needing _the bag to be banished into Lucius Malfoy.

Sure enough, just as if he had hit the bag with a full powered banishing charm with his wand, the bag accelerated roughly through the air, hitting Lucius who had started to step towards the tapestry. It hit him full in the chest, prompting him to wrap his arms around the bag and fall directly backwards down the staircase behind him. All Harry heard for almost a full minute was the sound of glass breaking and curses.

* * *

><p>Rolling down stairs didn't leave Lucius with a lot of options to separate himself from the bag, and the tide of glass vials and half melted and moldy chocolate served to just give his robes further to the burlap sack. Every step he hit on his way down seemed to bring a new scrape, and every scrape was soon covered in glass and some kind of potion. After what felt like forever he hit a landing, his momentum pushing him to the edge of the landing, but not quite over the edge.<p>

Lucius landed roughly on his side, the bag now thoroughly secured to him by the bonds of melted chocolate and viscous potion.

Lucius could feel his mind slip gently from his control. Scores of faces appeared before his eyes. Blondes, brunettes, red heads, and they were all disgustingly enough, _women_. He couldn't help it though. His blood began racing through his veins. He could see these people, their features beginning to blend together in his mind's eye, and as he absorbed everything happening to him, his muscles relaxed on the edge of the landing.

A poor turn of events for the man.

His arms still circled about the sack on his stomach were the only things keeping its weight centered on him. As they fell to his sides on the ground, the sack rolled off of him, its weight shifting. As the sack rolled gently to the side, the half melted chocolate and poorly preserved potions connecting the fibers of his robe and the fibers of the bag shifted his body with it. Lucius was drawn again down the next story of stairs.

More crashing, more breaking of vials, and with every jarring step scraping it's way across his delicate pureblood form, more potion found its way into Lucius' system.

Harry stood at the top of the staircase next to Dobby the elf. The noises of Lucius' descent filled the enclosed space of the stairwell, bouncing about like their cause. The boy stood mute next to the house elf, both wondering what they had done that brought them here, and on what they recognized as a more important note, both wondering if they could get away from this without getting in trouble.

* * *

><p>There was a hurried knocking at the door before it opened a crack and someone urgently called out, "Boss?"<p>

Amelia grumbled. There had been three cases of rampant muggle baiting in the last week and the paperwork to just slap one of these bastards with a fine was driving her up the wall. Everyone knew not to bother her in paperwork mode. Men had lost their lives for lesser offences.

"What!?"

Kingsley Shacklebolt opened the door the rest of the way, walked in to the office, and stood in front of her desk with a mildly panicked look on his face, "Boss, you're just not gonna believe this, hell I've seen some of it and I don't believe it. I don't even know how to write it up! But I mean it involves a lot of high ups so we kinda need you there to sort it all out and make sure we're covered but seriously I'm just not sure-"

"Shacklebolt!" she said, startling the man out of his almost trance, "What the hell is going on, man? You're babbling."

"Sorry Boss. I need you to just see this one for yourself. We need to floo over to the Hogwarts infirmary."

Amelia was on her feet in a flash, "Aveta's bones! Why didn't you say sooner? What the hell has Harry done now?"

Shack cracked a smile at his boss' mental direction, "Harry's not involved ma'am, but honestly it's his level of trouble, all right."

* * *

><p>Lucius stood.<p>

Right?

This was standing?

His shoulders were in line with his hips AND his feet, and if all of those were in line then he was standing up, yeah? Except, he guessed, if he were straight and laying down. Or if he were curled up in a ball and one drew a straight line there from head to hip to foot.

Maybe that wasn't the best way to tell.

Lucius thought he was standing up and was going to work from there.

He needed to see someone. His body, his mind, his soul, and his blood all called out to become one with someone.

Someone blonde maybe?

Three score faces flickered before his face in a random slideshow of lust. Their hair was mostly blonde, though there may have been a brunette or redhead in there. He saw high, refined cheekbones, and possibly a chiseled jaw or two? There were amazingly perfect eyebrows there. Eyebrows you could make a living off of staring at.

Also a unibrow?

Lucius staggered to his feet (Hey! He hadn't been standing before!) and bracing himself against a conveniently placed nearby wall, he looked down at himself.

For some reason there appeared to be a burlap sack glued to his front, and some kind of cloak glued to his back. His arms were covered in bright red viscous muck, and only about half of it was his blood. He awkwardly separated himself from the sack at his front, and the cloak at his back, throwing both blindly over his shoulder as he finished with them. Taking his wand in his hands (trying to use only one when they were shaking as bad as they were seemed foolhardy) Lucius healed his arms and dried himself off, the potions covering his body firming and forming into red plates like they were some kind of mud.

Lucius ran a hand through his now flaky red hair, and with only a few stumbling steps set off towards the object of his affection.

As he approached the correct office Lucius had scared up a dozen roses from somewhere, and bearing them in front of him like a votive offering, he stepped into the office of the defense professor, "Giiiiiilderoooy! Oh! I have an offer for you I think you'll find most... attractive."

Lockhart, clad in his normal fuchsia bathrobe he wore when grading his quizzes, looked up from his desk. Around him on the walls of his office a dozen portraits of the man were doing mostly the same thing, several even wearing what appeared to be horn rimmed glasses as they graded what appeared to be painted quizzes. Even through the haze of potions Lucius briefly had to wonder who the man had commissioned to make twelve magical portraits of himself grading tests.

"Mr. Malfoy! What can I do for you? I have to admit, when you talked me into accepting Albus' offer I did not see any of this coming, but it has been an interesting year."

Lucius sidled up to the man's desk, placing the roses into a hastily conjured vase. He placed his hip on the mahogany desk, balancing his weight on it and leaning just a bit over.

"You're such an exceptional man, Gilderoy, just like me. It's so hard for exceptional men like us to find one another. We're just so few, don't you think, Gilderoy?"

The yellow blonde placed his peacock quill on his desk as the platinum blonde continued his advances. Before Lockhart could get a response out, Lucius slipped his hip off the desk and whipped around behind the man in one fluid motion.

"Back in my day, Gilderoy, exceptional men were available to help one another when their assistance was required. Can you help me, Gilderoy," the man's name leaving Lucius's lips in as breathy a voice as he could muster.

Lucius ran his hands from Lockhart's shoulder downward, across his chest and towards more interesting territory.

"Gilderoy, could you give me a hand?"

At least that's what he thought he did.

* * *

><p>They entered a scene in the Hogwarts infirmary that left them wondering if they hit the right floo address, or if the Department of Mysteries would soon be informing their loved ones that they managed to get themselves sucked off into an alternate reality like the Perks family the month before.<p>

Gilderoy Lockhart was sitting on a bed crying his eyes out, while Lucius Malfoy was lying prone and evidently unconscious inside a massive bubblehead charm.

The only thing the experienced investigators could get out of the awake one were repetitions of the words 'Bad touch!', and the only thing they could get off of the asleep one was a positive indicator for nearly every controlled lust inducing potion in the book. The potions all seemed to be tied to different people too, resulting in one of the longest and most confusing magical detection readouts Amelia had ever seen in her entire career.

No one knew what was going on despite every professor in the building being in the room, but Amelia could just feel a paperwork headache of blinding proportions building up.

As Madam Pomphrey began vanishing calming draughts into the disturbed Lockhart's bloodstream, the story came out.

* * *

><p>Lockhart heard something big hit his office door <em>way<em> too hard. Either someone had thrown another love note attached to a rock at his door, or the poor scion of the noble Crabbe line had tried to go to office hours again. Either way it meant more work.

Glancing into a mirror to make sure his favorite bathrobe was still secured in a professional fashion, Lockhart made to get up to answer his door when it slammed open and one of the most hideously Gryffindor sights he had ever seen fell flat on its face inside the office.

The shape was human enough, but it did look like someone had let that menace Peeves assault them with a dozen buckets of red and pink paint alongside drying charms.

Before he could get up to check on who or what just fell into his office, and maybe floo Madam Pomphrey, the thing stood up and swept its hair (maybe?) to the side, revealing the familiar face of Lucius Malfoy. Lockhart immediately sat down, his face betraying his annoyance.

"What? It's not bad enough that you and your bloody 'Dark Force Defense League' talk me into teaching at this stupid deathtrap, now you have to go and flake paint off on my rug?"

Lucius mumbled something below his hearing, and managed to right himself by leaning on Lockhart's desk. Lockhart could only stare at him angrily as he went even further, placing what appeared to be a small poison sumac bush (roots and all) onto his desk, marring the quizzes he was grading.

Lockhart leaned dangerously far back into his chair and nearly screeched, "Good Gods man! What the hell is wrong with you? I've heard the rumors that you've taken up inhaling muggle spraying paint, but this is a step too far sir!"

Lucius seemed to take his outburst as some sort of sign, swaying around the edge of the desk and pushing Lockhart's chair the rest of the way back. As his seat fell Gilderoy's head bounced off the floor, stunning him for a moment. Malfoy seemed to realize that this was an opportunity and he made like an aroused communist, which is to say he seized the means of reproduction.

That shocked the brain back into Lockhart's normally empty skull, causing him to flail about wildly and try to escape from the red stained man's firm handle on his genitals. With just a small amount of wrestling he managed to free himself, but only inasmuch as turning himself around on the ground could do. Lucius took this as another opportunity, his hands inexpertly attempting to drop his fly.

The sound of a zipper scared the very life out of Lockhart, who scrambled away from the aroused former death eater and grabbed his wand from where it had fallen from his pocket during the earlier assault. Whipping the stick of birch around in the only pattern he was actually familiar with, the blonde's voice cried out, "_OBLIVIATE!_"

* * *

><p>As Amelia handed out personal orders to each of the working personnel, reassuring everyone that if complaints came down the line there would be no repercussions on them, she had a hint, just a shade, of a smile on her face.<p>

As she left in the company of Kingsley Shacklebolt to head back into the office, the large man look keenly at her and couldn't help but ask, "Boss, I know you really don't like Malfoy, but seriously why in the hell are you smiling?"

"Simple, Shack old boy, this one ain't Harry's fault. There are no portraits in the hallway with the potions spill, you heard all of the elf reports, no one has heard a thing, and Harry was in the Hufflepuff dormitories during the whole incident with Lockhart and Malfoy. Hogwarts is one of the most well observed places in the entirety of Great Britain, and none of our intelligence reports from anyone, even the statues about the place, say Harry was anywhere near the place. "

Kingsley appeared to be weighing the thought in his mind.

"Shack it brings me back to the old days, when every big DMLE case wasn't related to my family. And Malfoy's gonna be embarrassed as all hell when the mind healers finish with him, assuming he doesn't ask to have the whole thing _obliviate_d on principle. Shack old boy, I could sing."

* * *

><p>Just a handful of days later, when the friends and family made their way off the Hogwarts express, they were met by their parents near the false wall leading back out to King's Cross. Lord and Lady Abbot were speaking quietly with Remus, which surprised Harry a bit given the whole lycanthropy thing. Mr. and Mrs. Granger seemed to be getting a bit more used to the whole magical world, as they stood in conversation with Andromeda, Amelia, the dowager Longbottom, and the impressively colored form of Lord Lovegood. They had somehow worked out how their children were friends, and had evidently decided to up their chances of seeing their offspring quickly by standing near one another.<p>

As Harry and his friends all closed with their parents, Amelia left the group to meet with her portion of the crowd. When they got close she hugged her brood, and said, "I'd ask about your year, but I know all about it because police reports crossed my desk about nearly every significant part," Harry gulped and took a finger to his collar, remembering a certain incident involving love potions and an elf named Dobby, "So I'm just gonna go with this: Nymphadora dear, lovely to see you again, you too Susan. Harry, please don't do anything else to make me ground you."

Harry couldn't help but smile as his friends all snickered.

It was gonna be a fun summer.


	31. Chapter 29: Poor Decision Making Skills

Chapter 29: Dear God, How Did I Get Talked Into This Again?

Dobby was busy.

Dobby was happy.

Dobby was busy so Dobby was happy. The elf's face lit from within with a massive smile. Dobby was free!

Great wizard Harry Bones had said he would try to free Dobby, and Dobby was a little ashamed to have doubted Great Wizard Harry Bones. Bad master had been going down to Greasy's lair, because Greasy had some kind of weird human drug potion to share.

Dobby liked sharing.

Drug potions were bad though.

Bad Master wanted to trip Great Wizard Harry Bones on top of stair case, which made Dobby sad. Dobby did what he could to help Great Wizard. Bad Master had standing orders to ensure he never looked wrinkled or 'uncouth'. Dobby wasn't sure what couth was. Dobby also wasn't sure how one could not be couth. Dobby treated it like most orders he didn't understand, he filed it away in the back of his mind and ignored it.

Dobby digressed.

After Bad Master tried to trip Great Wizard Harry Bones, Dobby was sure he saw wrinkle on left calf of Bad Master's pants beneath his robes. Dobby petrified the cloth, making it stiff so he could better applying ironing magic. Bad Master was not ready for his leg to not move right, and when Great Wizard Harry Bones threw bag at Bad Master, Bad Master went down stairs.

Dobby did not have lots of experience with potions. Grimey, who worked in Greasy's lab cleaning when Greasy did not look, knew more about potions. Also Biscuit and Tipper, but they worked in Wales and Belgium, so Dobby did not often talk to them. Dobby would have asked questions though, because when Bad Master fell, he got covered in all kinds of potions from bag that Great Wizard Harry Bones was carrying!

Dobby wondered if Great Wizard Harry Bones wanted potions back, but when Dobby looked at Harry Bones, he saw him grin. Dobby guessed not.

Bad Master fell down a few flights of stairs, and Dobby met him at the bottom. His clothes were very wrinkled, but before dobby could try to immobilize him and get him looking better, Bad Master threw off his cape! He threw it straight to Dobby!

Dobby was free!

Bad Master wandered off in a daze, but Dobby didn't much care. Dobby just stood there, struck by how open he felt. Dobby felt like the whole world was open and in front of him! Imagine all the work he could do now that he wasn't just stuck with Bad Master!

Dobby drew himself up, and with a snap brought himself back to Great wizard Harry Bones, throwing himself at the human's legs. Dobby hugged with every bit of strength in his body, he was free!

Great Wizard Harry Bones said something about needing to get out of there. Dobby didn't know how that corridor counted as 'dodge', but Dobby forgave humans not making sense. Harry Bones even thought he was an elf, so he was maybe more confused than normal humans. Dobby didn't care though, Great Wizard Harry Bones was _Great_!

Great wizard Harry Bones ran away, muttering about alibis, which is what made Dobby start thinking. Bad Master's Spawn was always asking for alibis, and making Dobby hide things he did wrong. Great Wizard Harry Bones must have been afraid Bad Master might come back to him in anger after whatever potions he had on him went away. Great Wizard Harry Bones was silly though, he left all kinds of evidence he was there!

Bad Master once hired a team of hitwizards to prove Bad Master's Spawn broke a vase. Bad Master's Spawn would have punished Dobby for getting caught, so Dobby had to get good at hiding evidences quick! Dobby spent many hours in front of a human television watching portraits talk about solving crimes, so Dobby knew how to hide evidences.

Dobby was proud of his skills, and Dobby thought his secret hero Great Professor James Moriarty would have been proud of Dobby.

Walking quickly along the path that Great Wizard Harry Bones had followed before Bad Master tried to trip him, Dobby worked his magic on every portrait he saw. A few gargoyles had a view through a window that may have seen great wizard Harry Bones, so Dobby destroyed them and made new inanimate ones in the same shape. Dobby cleaned away any evidence of Great Wizard Harry Bones' footsteps, and standing where Bad Master was tripped by Dobby cast lots of clothes ironing magics, so magic in the area would be too muddy to sense Great Wizard Harry Bones'.

Dobby paid a visit to Flappy, and between tales of humanses being bad to owls, and promises of owl treats for her little boy and girls, Dobby ensured she would never say a word to any human.

Great Wizard Harry Bones was Dobby's new project, and Dobby knew that of his first day on the job was any kind of indicator, there would be lots and lots of work for him!

* * *

><p>'Read me first, you twit'<p>

How could Harry not look into that?

Insulting him was beginning to look like a disturbing trend in founders-related objects though.

Harry recovered the book from beneath his bed in the depths of his trunk where he had hidden it during the end of the term, and sat at his desk to look into it. The covers were wooden, and engraved in bas-relief was what Harry could only assume was the Slytherin family crest.

The binding gave Harry a distinct impression of being magical. It was sort of like how Hogwarts felt old, and like knowledge, or how the Forbidden Forest gave off the impression that it held a lot secrets. The cover and the binding both felt like... Conversion? Change maybe? Harry felt like he didn't quite have a word for it.

He opened the cover with not a little anticipation. Anticipation which immediately unraveled as he found the book was blank. He immediately flipped to another page further back. Blank.

Running his thumb along the edge of the book and flipping the pages past gave him a quick preview of the whole thing, and it was entirely without a mark on it anywhere. In frustration, he closed the cover with a hard smack and glared at it furiously. The large snake on the Slytherin crest seemed to smirk at him, its tiny eyes glinting in a mocking way from the light of the open window next to Harry.

Harry grabbed the book and made to put it back into his trunk, he'd use it for notes or something maybe, when he saw that the words at the spine of the book had changed.

'Ink, twit.'

Now the book was getting even more shirty with him, great.

Harry moved back to his desk and uncapped an ink well from the wizarding supplies he kept in back. Mundane pens were just so much better it wasn't funny. Feeling rather peeved with the apparent offensiveness of the book, Harry drizzled the ink from the well liberally throughout the pages.

After he was satisfied with his minor revenge, and also following the instructions he guessed, Harry turned back to the first page of the book to see if there had been any effect. The book merely sat there, defying him yet again.

With a now wet sounding smack Harry closed the tome again and looked at the spine, hoping for some more inspiration. The carved words muddled a bit before they formed the word 'Patience.'

After a moment there came a mildly stomach turning sucking sound from the pages of the books, and the ink he had spread across the sheets absorbed into it. Harry opened the book and looked to the first page, and sure enough there were words.

_Ah, to have ink again. You would not believe how it dries and itches as it ages. I used to wonder why some of the old tomes we held in the library would get so antsy, I thought it was the castle or my awful wife, but now I sympathize..._

How in the nine realms was he supposed the answer that? What does one say to a whinging book?

_I forget myself. Come boy, write in me a bit. If I'm to have an heir we may as well do this right. Tell me, what year is it truly? Not having a _tempus_ does grate on the nerves after a while._

Harry picked up a quill, and for a moment seriously asked himself what he was doing. Then he shrugged and began to jot.

**Hello I suppose. I'm Harry Bones, and it's the year 1993. Who are you?**

_1993 you say? Well I'll be. It's been sixty or so years since I was last taken from that depressing cave. I always said caves were depressing. Give me a good tower any day, the way Merlin used to do it, it was. Good enough for him, good enough for me._

An absent minded book? Or was it just ignoring him?

_Oh how the mind wanders. What were you saying then? Let us see here... Harry Bones is it? And what's this, who am I? Hmm. Well seems like I was right to call you a twit. My heir waltzes right into my old vault, picks me up and then has to go and ask who I am. I used to say to Rowena, they'll get more stupid as time goes on, just you watch._

**Are you Salazar?**

_Someone get this boy a knighthood! He broke the code, how did we ever get about without him, they'll say._

**You're a bit of an arse, aren't you?**

_And you have a knack for remarking on plain things don't you, lad?_

**You're lucky I respect history, or I'd burn this dumb book.**

_History am I now? Well, you go and live to the ripe age of a thousand twenty-three and then you come talk to me then, hmm? And as if you'd burn me! Ha! You have no idea what this tome is for, do you?_

**A joke you left enchanted to act like a gormless prat to whoever opened it?**

_What in the hell are your parents and heads of house teaching these days! I don't care if it has been sixty years! How were you directed to me?_

**Well I've gotten access to your vault from nowhere, and I went in to have a look around. You haven't any gold or anything, mostly just a library so old and moldy it's worthless. The Goblins think my slaying your old familiar granted me access.**

_You killed my snake! What the hell, I liked that snake! She knew the finest dirty jokes I've ever had the pleasure to hear! Why she used to tell this one about a giantess who got drunk and decided to capture a Goblin chief and stick him in__**asdiienntnhsidntrknflkjadfluadljf**_

Harry crossed out and wrote over as much of the next few words as he could. He loved a good joke as much as the next boy, but he drew the line at giantesses sticking Goblins places. Really a good bit before that point. Looking back at the page he spied a few more lines beneath his crossed out and covered words.

_- and he goes, 'Spelunker? I just met her!'_

**Shut it, pervert.**

_Hahahahaha, that's rich. Loved that one. Anyway. I don't really care how you got a hold of me. If you had access to my vault then it must have been just. The Goblins are pretty big on that whole thing. You evidently don't know, so it's up to me to tell you._

Harry got the distinct impression that if a book could clear its throat, this one would be doing so.

_I am the last remnant of Salazar Slytherin. First of the great house of Slytherin, and one of the founders four of the school Hogwarts. With my former Partner Helga Hufflepuff I helped create the foundation of the mind art of Legilimency, and I was master of sympathetic magic. I created this tome through my mastery over my art, and left a portion of my very being, my soul in its pages to ensure my knowledge wouldn't die alongside my mortal form._

It was a safe bet that sounded really majestic in his head. Or pages. Harry frowned.

**Sympathetic magic? And your soul is in here?**

Tapping his quill on the page for a moment, he responded.

**Sorry for putting ink all over it I guess.**

_Thin nothing of it, boy. Now given that you've never heard of this book before and don't know how it works, a little proof may be in order, hmmm?_

**That would help your case, yeah. I'm not a historian, or an expert in enchanting, but I do have a strong belief that one shouldn't blindly trust the word of every book they come across with the ability to talk back and an attitude.**

_Got a bit of a wit on you, eh? That will make this more fun. I always enjoyed a student with a bit of wit. Now I'm going to draw you inside my pages to show you a few memories of me, Helga, and Godric. I'll also show you a few things you can verify for yourself in Hogwarts. I've done this to prove myself to everyone else that has seen these pages. I'm trying to show all of my facts and everything clearly and honestly with you, here._

**I have no fear. Your soul would be torn apart a piece at a time by those that would come to avenge me.**

Harry drew a small smiling face, a taunting grin on his lips.

**Like a pensieve then?**

_Hmmm... good point I suppose. And it's like a pensieve in the same way a stunning spell is like being hit with a rock to the back of your head._

Harry had enough time to curse before his awareness was sucked from his body and thrust into the pages under his fingers.

* * *

><p>It was easy to see Remus Lupin's excitement, the wolf in him made him a much more passionate man than most and when he was experiencing strong emotions it overrode his self-control and became visible.<p>

He had only been a part of Harry's life since Christmas, and he could honestly say it had been a serious whirlwind of adventure, terror, and excitement the entire time. He had to go close a few contracts he had outstanding in the UK for the first week of the summer, but now that he had done that, he was in the clear to spend the rest of the warmer months hanging out with his last link to the past.

In light of this, the unwilling lycanthrope was slightly more than confused to finally arrive at the Ossuary to find that Harry seemed... busy?

Withdrawn maybe?

He didn't seem to have a hell of a lot of time for Remus, oh he made all the right noises and spent what time Remus could spare with him. They talked a bit about James and his unfortunate predilection for pranking. They talked somewhat more about his biological mum and her distaste for the same, usually expressed while she and Moony were making their rounds as prefects. Harry's heart just wasn't in it though, Remus could tell.

He stood for three days of the strange suppressed behavior before seeking out Amelia and Andi for their interpretations, and while they too noticed Harry's subdued behavior, they had no wisdom to offer. From what they heard from the other munchkin's letters, Harry habitually erected privacy wards around his bed and around their study areas. The kids understood it away as Harry's infinite preference to sleep in late and hide in a pile composed primarily of blankets. He evidently just held his cards close to his vest, but the whole thing smelled wrong to Lupin.

They had never known Harry to get into anything _too_ bad. Excepting, of course, his freelance dark creature slaying, his unsanctioned dark lord slaying, and the odd 'surprise! I'm bonded magically to X' moments. In hindsight, maybe they needed to invest in some kind of stronger monitoring charms for the boy. The Banded-Eyed one alone knew what kind of trouble Harry was apt to get into when he came of age.

The werewolf decided to keep his eyes open.

* * *

><p>Tonks was displeased. Not for the first time she briefly reflected on using her given name even internally. Nymphadora. Gods forbid. Her friends got away with Nym at her sufferance, but it got a little too close to her stupid name.<p>

She shook her head and refocused.

Nym was sitting on the landing above the second foyer in the Ossuary. Magical homes had to face the increased etiquette-based challenge of guest entrance outside the normal front door entry used by polite mundane guests. In answer to this call, most manor homes had a second foyer located at the weakness in their wards corresponding to the normal operation, floo, and portkey entrances.

Amelia and Andromeda were both standing in front of a crowd of concerned house elves having a somewhat heated argument about decorations and correct polishing waxes of all things.

Nym huffed.

It was stupid, they were both freaked out because the Delacours were coming over in a few weeks and the house needed to be spick and span for the guests, especially because Amelia was leaving for that conference. She could kinda see what the big deal was, Mr. Delacour was high up in the french ministry, Mrs. Delacour had an important mum, and had a bunch of fashion businesses in Paris or whatever.

To her though, the adults weren't the big deal. They'd be bringing over _her_, and her sister. And they were _Veela_.

Nym was stuck in a weird place. Susan, and Hannah, and Hermione, and after this last year Luna, were all in their group too, but they were different. Despite all of them, Harry was still hers. They were the metamorphs.

She wasn't as big on the books and newspapers as Harry and Hermione, but she was still smart. There were currently twenty others like her and Harry in the entire world, and most of them lived in a commune in Finland. The nearest in age to the pair of them was already thirty-two years old.

It wasn't fair. Harry shouldn't be tied to _her_. And even if he wasn't she had to go and be Veela. Nym wasn't concerned about looks, she could look like she wanted and she knew looks meant nothing to Harry for the same reason, but Veela magic was different.

Even if it wasn't, Harry lost his heart for _her_, they were connected.

As Amelia claimed victory in the debate of gloss versus high-gloss on the floor below her, Nym hugged the banister and idly kicked her feet in the air, a glum expression on her face.

* * *

><p>Harry sat at a desk, much like what he had gotten used to working with by at Hogwarts. The room around him felt very cold, nearly enough to make him shiver, but he dismissed it. His desk was alone in the center of a bare room, a chalkboard on one end and a blank stone wall on the other.<p>

He may have recognized it, but them after two years in Hogwarts almost any blank stone wall looked sort of familiar.

Finally the old bastard that brought him here waltzed up to the front of the room and began scratching away at the chalkboard. Harry had to pause and wonder how it was they had finely processed chalkboard and chalk, but he dismissed the concern. Magic. Why else?

"Alright! You're mine for the next few hours, and maybe months depending on the time compression you can get once we truly begin working, so you best get ready. I'll only be saying all of these things once, and unless aging impacts me more than I believe it will, you're getting but one chance at this."

Harry had to suppress a snicker. This was a memory, it wasn't like he could take notes.

"My name, as you likely know, is Salazar Slytherin, and these memories are intended as an introduction to the skills you must master to truly be worthy of my lineage and your name, whatever that is. Rowena is always speaking about how our names will change, and that these skills won't matter because they'll be old and outdated by the time someone has genuine use for me, but I know how these things work. We get all of this fresh blood in, and they make changes, then the older ones reject the changes, and so forth until it all gets out of control."

Slytherin seemed to be madly pacing in front of the chalkboard bearing his name. Harry really hoped that the 'lessons' Sal promised weren't all going to be like this.

"Godric is always moaning about his upstart students, at least where Helga can't hear him, but he is a good for nothing highlander, so what can you expect from him. But I digress! Welcome, student, to your first lesson."

The man's face lit up at the front of the room, a cruel looking grin stretching across it. For a moment Harry no longer saw the monkey-ish man that made a four story statue of himself in his secret clubhouse, the man before him was a sorcerer of the highest order.

"Sympathy. Sympathetic magic. It has no hard and fast rules, it has no exacting standards. It is nothing less than the art of taking something small, and using it to do something massive."

He flicked a primitive wand from his sleeve, and with a whisper he conjured a large hunk of granite, which crashed to the ground a few centimeters beneath it with a massive crash.

"Sympathy exploits the power of your mind to delude itself. The human mind is so strange and varied that it can convince itself and other minds of virtually anything. I have perfected an ability to use this fanciful-colorful-fluid aspect of the human mind alongside my magic to form a connection and thus a sameness between two things. You force yourself to believe, to know that your small scale is equal, is identical, and is in every way not only the same, but concurrent with your target. When the two are the same, when the rock is in the palm of your hand, your will makes your actions real," He flexed an open palm into a fist, miming crushing something, and as he did so the boulder was reduced to pebbles and shards with a terrible groaning.

With a smile on his face Slytherin dusted his palm off, producing a curious amount of dust in the process.

"Before you is the work of a master at the height of his art," Slytherin refocused, looking directly through Harry despite the separation of a thousand years and the haze of memory, "you can spend your life on this discipline and never come a far as I have. Even should you go as far as I have, your strength can be taken from you with but a simple battle confusion spell, or a strike to your head. You will learn my art, as well as how to defend it. Return now back to your body. We will speak again if you prove worthy."

With a wrenching that felt like a portkey that had been soaked in re'em blood, Harry was thrown from his seat. The book drew him in as he sat in front of his desk, so as he was released he fell to the floor next to his chair.

"Sod buggering hell! What the flaming arse was that!"

Harry scrambled up and away from the book, looking at it with concern in his eye. At least the book hadn't lied. It was kind of like getting smacked in the head with a rock. From where he stood he could see that the book had written 'Well?' on itself, but he decided he definitely needed a moment to think this over.

That was an impressive bit of magic to be sure. Assuming it wasn't all some kind of set up, he could really get something out of this. The immediate implications of what he had seen sunk in after a bit.

Walking back to the book he took up his quill again.

**Did you actually pace and spend time sneering and demonstrating things in front of a single empty seat alone in a classroom so you would have memories of it to show? Did you actually do that?**

The lines that made up the book's response formed slowly, with an air of hesitance.

_Rowena was always after me to get a hobby._

* * *

><p>Remus was no stranger to the disillusionment charm. It was how he avoided aspiring death eaters during his time at Hogwarts, how he avoided real death eaters in his time after Hogwarts, and the only thing that kept him from showing up in the local gazette when he occasionally woke up naked in a field after a full moon.<p>

It was a very useful charm, but quite difficult. The amount of power you put into it varied greatly depending on the size and mass of what you were covering, and it was so specific that if one weren't careful disillusionment was a great way to melt whatever you were casting on. Incorrectly applied, or rather inexpertly, it also caused one to leave heat mirage waves when one moved.

Remus had no trouble with the charm, for which he grateful, and Harry wasn't in the habit of casting _hominem revelio_, for which he was also grateful. It all added up to the old werewolf having a front row seat in Harry's room to what he was sure would be the boy's next fit of madness.

For the moment, he appeared to be arguing with a book over what looked like plans to a massive building. A lightly glowing conch shell lay next to the book, emitting the other half of the conversation. Harry's words seemed to be translated into the book by a standard dictation quill.

The words leaving the conch rang out rather tinny in the air, it was toneless, but somehow Remus felt he wasn't missing a lot without the tone in the voice.

"-because you can completely knock out the guard without being caught. Admittedly we didn't have the same security issues in my day, but we would have had a simple rune cluster that activated when the guard stopped touching it. Eliminate him, and an alarm would go off."

"You haven't seen the ministry. Gabby said her dad once describe them as not being able to find their arses if they had both hands, a tracking charm, and a magically updating map. Though it's not like the French have a great history with us on either side of the magic line."

"French?"

Harry looked up from the building plans he was examining with a confused expression, "The French... ummm... the Gauls?"

"Good Merlin, and you're courting one of their daughters?"

"Shut it, book."

"Shut what, young heir?"

Harry ran his fingers through his hair and sighed deeply, "It's just cultural thing. You've missed out on a lot Sal. Listen, I need to do this. I'm disconnecting you, we can talk more tomorrow."

"Sleep well then, remember your meditation."

"Goodnight, Sal."

Remus watched as Harry moved the shell away from the book, making it lose its glow. He sat back down, letting his weight fall heavily into the padded seat, and began talking to himself.

"I can't get to Sirius without passing through these offices. I can't get to the offices without passing through these hallways, and I can't get to the hallways unless I can find an untraceable way into the floo link, or learn to apparate in the next few weeks. I can get through the halls, as long as I can avoid the locals, I just don't know how to get past whatever mum thought to put there. How the hell-arse am I going to get him out of there?"

The boy scrunched into his seat further, bringing his knees under himself. His eyes never left the maps in front of him, staring straight through them as if his glare alone could bring an answer out of the parchment.

Remus honestly thought it would have been an adorable sight, if, that was, the boy hadn't been considering what amounted to a capital crime amongst British magicals. His sigh challenged the limits of his silencing charm. If nothing else Harry did end up inheriting the true marauder spirit.

Moving under his charms, he took a seat in the overstuffed chair Harry kept in the corner of his room. With a twist of his wand, Remus turned a framed picture of a bunch of kids frolicking into a white cat which he seated comfortably in his arms and began petting. As he contemplated how to catch Harry's attention, a tear nearly escaped his eye.

The old marauder special.

James spent all of his arithmancy lessons from fourth year to November of his sixth working on the spell. It had to balance a significant power requirement against its intention, which was to be cast with an easily missed gesture. The final breakthrough came when James applied the idea of twirling one's wand through their fingers as a wand movement. The circular spinning wound up the power like a Tibetan prayer wheel, and released it in a flash of light and crashing thunder.

Harry jumped from his place in his chair and turned wildly to face the corner of his room. His wand in hand already and a curse on his lips, his eyes resolved the image of his would be attacker the moment before he released the spell on the edge of his tongue.

"So I see you're trying to break into Azkaban?"

Remus smiled widely as the child before his nearly gave himself a concussion he face palmed so hard. Harry should have known this was going to happen when he made the mistake of showing Remus his Ian Fleming collection.

* * *

><p>He had Mooney now.<p>

Which was good.

Harry ran a hand through his hair and kneeled down. With an adult who had occasional legitimate business with the ministry and at Azkaban (the old wolf not being above the odd bounty hunt) his transport problems were solved. Now it was just aurors, dementors, enchantments, and the gamut of ministry security, which really could run just about any direction on him. But Harry killed a basilisk once, he could probably do it.

The same laws and loopholes that kept Sirius in jail and allowed him to be legally an adult but still qualify under laws protecting minors meant that without in-depth schemes of the wards in question, he and Mooney could be walking into anything. The plans he had been able to drag up from the Goblins were only physical layouts. He knew which offices, staircases, and corridors he had to take, but that was it. He had something like ten generations of wizengamot meddling to contend with.

It just wasn't enough for a daring midnight raid to secure the future of his godfather.

Really, it wasn't like he owed the man a lot. After all he went off all half-cocked and got himself thrown in jail, leaving Harry exposed to his... relatives... gods above. Harry hadn't thought about them in a long time. But mum loves him. Loved him? Harry and Nym had some suspicions about her and Aunt Andi.

Shaking his head he brought himself out of a few painful memories and a few weird ones. Harry would free his godfather. He wouldn't lose anyone else. Figuring Mum and Andi out was something he had years to do, so it wasn't a prioirity.

It all brought him to where he was currently, kneeling in the middle of a circle of runes he barely understood, each written by his hand in just a bit of his own blood. Salazar directed him through the whole process, describing it as a kind of 'rite of passage' for those initiates in the art of sympathy.

Further demonstrations from the long-dead man had shown him more about the power of sympathetic magic, which was only limited by the will and imagination of the user. In his memories, Salazar had shown him how it could be used (and often was) by singular house elves to do the laundry of hundreds in Hogwarts in the span of a night. He used a boulder still embedded in the ground to cause a three story mansion to rise from the earth fully furnished and formed, and he used a leaf to cause the forbidden forest to reform into a topiary filled with statues of himself in different poses.

Harry had shot a little of his magic into that memory to see what closely followed it, which had principally been Helga chasing him through the forest for the crime of vanity that her beloved trees had been victims to.

Sal was a vain man, and Helga loved her plants. It was amusing to see what kinds of things about the founders had survived so long.

And now he was distracting himself again. Harry had finally found the last piece of the ritual he was to undergo and he was ready. The runes surrounding him served to direct the intent of the magic, taking the weight of understanding the ritual and it's symbolism off of Harry and codifying it in his very life essence. Magic was ruled by the mind, and the mind was ruled by the nebulous bounds of imagination and metaphor. Harry's lack of understanding could have killed him, so Sal instructed him in the use of his own blood to protect himself.

With shaking hands he removed the angular green pod from the silk bag it had been sent to him in. He wasn't sure if he should bless Hedwig for getting it to him so quickly, or curse her for not giving him more time to dither. It was narrow, and somewhat like a cone, it's stem twisting off of the pod at almost a ninety degree angle.

Now that he was here, and he had his unbloomed flower, he centered himself, and placing a hand on the runes surrounding him he opened the floodgates holding back his power, charging them. Suddenly there was light in his room. It was like starlight, diffuse, without a point source so it came from everywhere.

When the light kept going after he removed his power from the circle, Harry knew he was ready. Depending on whether or not Harry trusted the words of a cut off chunk of soul from the father of the modern pureblood supremacy movement, he now had to work a little herbological magic and prepare his body for the unknown.

It was moments like this he had to step back from his life and look at the kind of things he got into. He _did_ trust a disembodied soul chunk from a racist man, dead for nearly a thousand years.

With barely a thought, he cast a low level restoration charm. It was taught to firsties, a basic charm to cause a plant to bloom. And it did. In his hands the conical green pod bloomed amazingly into a bird of paradise at the perfect moment of picking.

Wizards as a species, British wizards in particular, lived in a world where thought and imagination became fact through sheer acts of will. Things that are merely amusing to mundanes, similes, metaphors, euphemisms, idioms and wit, they all became physical reality in the face of a wizard's power.

Inside the circle of Harry's blood, runes crafted by centuries of intent on the part of wizards in the UK and beyond dictated that any action performed inside the circle would come to affect the way Harry perceived the world. If he tripped and injured himself, his senses would deaden and he would likely perceived pain until the end of his days. If he levitated something, he would likely see the silver lining of any cloud he encountered for the rest of his life, possibly literally. Instead, by his will and intent, a flower bloomed. It opened to receive the world around it. It opened to display its beauty, and to become ready to share its pollen.

Harry's pupils expanded to their limits, and for a brief period of time, he lost consciousness.

* * *

><p>As the fourteenth of July came about, the adults began freaking out and cleaning the whole house. Wardrobes were purchased, discarded, and re-purchased. The elves were having the times of their lives redoing the layouts of nearly every room in the estate, and Remus was even found heading out to finally see a professional after attempting rather badly to cut his own hair three times.<p>

Harry had no idea why they were being so crazy, it was just Gabrielle coming over with her folks. He was certainly excited to see her again, and he could feel her excitement over whatever their link was. It wasn't that big of a deal though.

Upon reflection he guessed that it may have had something to do with her dad being the French minister of magic, which was kinda cool. If you were dead set on being all formal about it, it was kind of a national function and having the French minister of magic sending his youngest daughter to Hogwarts was a big deal and all. The Bones family was also (despite their guests being "filthy frogs") taking a big step up in the social world, hosting a guest of such significance.

Further reflection brought forth the idea that her mother may have had something to do with it too. Appoline Delacour was the daughter of the matron of the largest Veela coven on the Eurasian landmass, and setting aside her immediate family was a powerful witch and businesswoman in her own right. She chaired a fashion consortium that owned controlling interests in some of Paris' most exclusive fashion houses, making her a significant part of the social coup scored by house Bones.

But as such things are wont to do, most of the importance and preparation went above the heads of the kids. Susan, Hannah, and a very grudging Nym all joined Harry in his excitement to see Gabrielle again, so it was with a generally collected sense of tension that the Delacours portkeyed into the Ossuary on the twentieth.

They arrived as all portkeys do, in a flurry of motion and with a strange sense of pacing. No matter the angle of the viewer, they appeared as though they were approaching directly and rapidly from a distance, growing from a speck to the size of a family and what appeared to be a few retainers. Their motions didn't stop there though. They seemed to be spinning like a top, and almost fast enough for their bodies to generate lift. Suddenly the entire group was standing in a mass in the receiving hall.

Everything about witnessing the process seemed to bend the mind slightly, leading to the normal polite response of not directly viewing a person or group porting in to a location. Well, that and the occasional eye-watering tendency for older witches and wizards to choose 'nothing' as their trendy under-robe ensemble.

As soon as everyone caught their bearings, a silver haired missile made of human flesh shot from the inside of the circle of people, and straight for Harry. Like an unconscious reflex, Harry was suddenly the exact same height and size as his attacker, and as physics might normally dictate in such a collision, they knocked instantly to the ground.

Gabrielle was murmuring constantly in an inarticulate pidgin of French and English, her arms wrapped firmly around Harry's shoulders. For his part Harry had a smile on his face that plastic explosives couldn't remove, and he merely lay crushed underneath the body of one of his best friends.

Jean-Pierre and Appoline stood next to Amelia and Andromeda, each having quietly exchanged pleasantries during the now going on four minute tirade their youngest had embarked on. Everyone in the room (most markedly their security guard) was beginning to think it was going on too long, but the sight was rather too cute to be interrupted.

Gabrielle wore herself down and when she finally picked herself up and stood over Harry's prone body, he caught her last word.

A cheeky smile lit his face, "In trouble, or am trouble?"

A smile peaked from behind the clouds she was trying to gather into her expression, "Both!"

The adults laughed, as did her sister from beside them.

* * *

><p>Nym lay on top of her bed, fully clothed. She had nightmares sometimes. Flashes of pain, pinpricks of light that made her think of fire and lightning. Sometimes it was the night sky, but lit from below by rushing colors she knew heralded death and destruction. It bothered her (it was a nightmare, duh) but not because when she dreamed these things, she was dreaming of war. They bothered her because she wasn't there doing whatever it was she dreamed. It peaked in from the edge of her awareness, but she knew she was being left behind on while the battle was fought and that was the part that made them intolerable.<p>

Sleep eluded her, but tonight it wasn't because of any of these dreams. She was doing this herself.

On her feet were the slippers her mum had given her years ago, fuzzy black sheep, and they looked ridiculous. But for her purpose they were ideal. The rest of her attire wasn't too far-fetched for sleep clothes, but they each also met her purpose in the same way the slippers did. Well fit but slightly worn silk pants and a high-necked long sleeve affair made of dark and thick cloth. They were intended for a drafty Scottish castle in a different season, but if one were to try and sneak about an unlit manor corridor during the night...

After two ages, an epoch, and at least one era, the noise she had been waiting for finally came from the tiny space between the thick green carpet of her room and her door. It was a sound she had been hoping to _not_ hear, but one she fully expected to hear all the same.

A slight slap and then just a hint of something sticky being pulled from a surface. The sound a well washed bare foot makes when it tries its hardest to not be heard as it walks on a marble floor.

One step, two, three.

A pause.

_No, those are just the curtains, they do that when the wind comes from the east like tonight, ignore it..._

Four, five, six, and they kept on, past the door that separated the walker from Nym's motionless form and Susan's gentle breathing.

_Keep going, keep going, keep going!_

They didn't though. From maybe five meters further down the hall, a minor squeak and then the too quiet of a last second silencing charm. Harry always forgot about his bottom hinge, which was dumb because he always complained to the elves that no matter how much oil and elbow grease he used, it kept squeaking. Nym knew it, she knew most of the things he said, even if it was to himself. She never knew why, he talked to himself a lot, he always thought no one was listening.

She usually was though, the boy would cause untold trouble if no one did.

Silently she counted to fifteen. And when she was done she tried again in French, her French wasn't great though. It was hard to learn on your own with only books, even if the publisher was game enough to enchant the pages to correct your accent. Of course Hogwarts books had seen use by so many children that she got distracted more often than not by the French curse words scrawled in an untidy hand between lines.

She resolved to double check _fille de bordel_ when she got back, she was fairly certain she was messing that one up.

With small but sure moves Nym left her bed and made her way to the door. She knew how to be quiet in moments like this. Most people were too tentative, they moved their arm, it rustled something, and they paused. _She_ made that mistake. The way to do it was the same way one poured out a too full container, or chained _reducto_ into _diffindo_ into _defodio_. You make the whole move at once, you don't speed up or slow down, you stay moving and you stay smooth. It was all in the confidence.

Nym opened the door with the same surety of movement, blessing the hearts of the Bones elves and cursing the unfairness of not being able to use magic. She desperately wanted to be jealous of how Harry could, but given how much he had lost for the dubious honor of underage magic, she couldn't bring herself to. For now, well-oiled hinges met her needs.

Despite their material, the halls of the Ossuary were dark at night. Her slippers, so cutesy and annoying in the light of day (they made Harry chuckle though, and the corner of her mum's mouth always lifted just a bit when she saw them) were a perfect silencer to her steps as she made her way to another recently used portal. The silk of her pants moved well with her, and while well maintained silk may have made a slick sliding noise as her legs moved and the fabric rubbed against itself, worn silk didn't.

She reached her target, and sat with her knees against her chest next to the door. Her ears strained against the sounds of a hall in the dead of night. The curtains moved with the same sound that had made _her_ pause, but Nym had spent enough time in the Ossuary to know it and discard it. She had been a little worried that she wouldn't be able to hear. Harry was often too zealous with his silencing. It solved the problems with plan B though, so she couldn't complain too much.

With the same confidence and surety she opened her own door, she reached for the handle on Harry's door and gave a twist. Pushing just a few centimeters, she got a peek into the room and immediately remembered why she had thought that opening the door was better suited to plans E through N. The top five shouldn't have let her see into the room in case she ended up seeing something she didn't really want to.

They sat on top of his bed, both clad in their night-wear. At least she thought Gabrielle normally wore that to bed. It was like a 1950s American sleep suit thing. A long sleeve button up and pair of pants, done in a nice light blue silk and cut just a hair more feminine. It looked good on her, Nym had to admit, but that made it worse.

They sat cross legged on the bed, their hands intertwined, speaking in whispers. She smiled and it lit her face up, but _Harry _also smiled. Normally he grinned. It was a half-grin, but it said a lot usually. His eyes could make it smarmy or playful or genuine, and the way he tweaked the corner of his lips could make it mean another half dozen things. She liked his grin. But she saw teeth now. There wasn't any subtlety to it, it was dumb and happy and she didn't like it and more importantly she didn't like that Gabrielle was causing it.

The _silencio_ was on the door thankfully, not on the door frame, so the gap she watched them through was just enough to catch a bit of what they talked about. Nym sat next to the door again and just absorbed their words from the gap. She could keep watching, but she didn't want to. They could see her skin color next to the darkness of the hall, and they'd be alerted. They could catch her eyes glinting from the flame of the candle lamp Harry kept lit next to his bed. They could catch her hair glinting off the same candlelight, because she never quite got a hold of keeping the color matte, or any of a hundred other things. That's why she wasn't looking any more.

Their whispers were excited. At least whatever link they had was muted by distance, but portkeys made it weird. Whatever. Nym wasn't bitter. She had felt him during the fight with the basilisk, but she had no idea he had been in so much danger. Harry spent a while telling her about it, and how much he had sold the body for. Gabrielle got a lot more out of what his account manager had said about 'flooding the market' and 'supply and demand dynamics' than even Harry did apparently.

Nym couldn't just sit there for their whole conversation. It was frustrating.

When Harry talked to her about the basilisk he had told it like it was some kind of epic tale. Nym liked that. It was about the spells he used, how he had been so damn lucky his jumping hadn't gotten him in more trouble, how that weird ass book hurt him and ended up bleeding ink. _She_ got a different version.

She got a different version of a lot of things.

Nym slunk back to her bed in Susan's room. Susan, Amelia, Harry and even the elves had all told her she could have a room to herself if she wanted, but she didn't. She liked hearing someone else, knowing that she wasn't there alone in the night. It wasn't a nightmare thing, she didn't have an awful lot of those. That recurring dream about being chased around by Hedwig wearing Dumbledore's robes was weird, but not really a nightmare after all. Nym just wanted people around her.

It made every night a bit better. It also made moments like this, where she quietly cried herself to sleep, a lot more livable.

* * *

><p>For a brief period the Ossuary was a hotspot of power. The boy-who-lived (lord of this that and the other, basilisk slayer, yadda-yadda, to his credit Harry was firmly of the opinion he didn't matter), head of the French magical government, a big player in Veela politics and interspecies fashion, A St. Mungo's healer, and the heirs to a number of fairly wealthy families.<p>

For all of that though, not only was there an entirely relaxed air to the place after Jean-Pierre's security cleared it, but there was a curious lack of political tension.

Jean-Pierre and Appoline were both only in the country for their youngest, and the most critical connection the French contingent that the English contingent had was based in the happiness of two of the children of the tribes.

If you held an image of Romeo and Juliet in your mind, and then removed everything that gave that particular play its drama and spark, you would have an accurate representation of how the ancient seat of the Bones family operated during the month of July.

Mostly accurate anyway.

Nym was withdrawn, her bubbly personality had stopped filling the room she was in, and in a retreat from her normal place just behind harry with her wand drawn, a smile on her face, and a hand ready to cuff him for his cheek, she stayed attached to her mother's apron strings.

The adults all had a pretty good laugh, and even Fleur got in on the action as it was perfectly clear through the lens of a few years experience what was going on. It was the way of it, crushes and loves at the cusp of puberty were so intense in the moment. Just a year's worth of distance from the same often changed everything so much that despite how much Nym felt about it, and how much Harry and Gabrielle didn't see the same, the older crowd felt no fear.

It was possible they should have, but such problems had time to develop.

Then of course came the twenty-fifth, and Susan Bones, Amelia Bones, Kingsley Shacklebolt, and Rufus Scrimgeour left Britain for the shining night skies of Las Vegas, USA and the Twelfth annual International Magical Law Enforcement Expo. The mini-break was to last three days.

Amelia felt perfectly safe leaving the kids in the hands of Andromeda and the French head of state. Andi handled them all with grace, and there were ten aurors on station constantly for security, so even Harry couldn't get up to too much trouble.

Imagine that.

* * *

><p>Nym was slinking through the hallways again, but this time with more purpose than tracking a rogue French witch.<p>

Harry and Uncle Mooney had been being more quiet than usual of late, and while a small part of her recognized that it was likely because catching the head of French Magical government in in a prank spell that turned one's underthings into living and flailing trout wasn't a good thing for international relations, it wasn't like either of them to simply let a week go past without at least jinxing each other's shampoo.

She had to suppress a giggle. The last time Harry had gotten Remus' soap, he found some kind of way to get gillyweed into the older man's aftershave, resulting in him growing gills as a form of facial hair. Watching Remus try to eat breakfast with his head buried in a hastily conjured fish tank had also been pretty good.

Nym wasn't buying it.

Sure the French were a good excuse, and it may have even been true, but coupled with their relative silence in the last week, she knew something was up. She could feel it. Which was why she was now outside Remus' door at 23:30, easing it open to see if she could get inside.

"Lock picks?"

"What do you mean lock picks?"

"What do you mean, what do you mean? It's not like they're leaving the doors open for us."

Harry scrunched his face, Nym knew that look, he was confused and slightly disappointed, "I thought we were gonna go all 'A-Team' on this. You know, like magnesium in the lock hole or something."

"Kid, we're going to go break your godfather out of jail and you're trying to channel a television show? This is serious business, you can't-"

"Of course it's Sirius business, why do you think we're here!"

Remus looked very defeated in that moment. Almost as if he knew this wasn't going to end well.

"Back to the list then. Invisibility cloak, check. Magic cancelling Rune markers, check. Balaclavas with built in anti-summoning, privacy, and sticking charms, check. Remus' 'Russian Midnight Special' that he refuses to tell me about, check."

The werewolf left his funk, "Remember no magic. Any spell means they can tie this to us. That's why we conjured all of this beforehand and here, no magical signature means no tracking us."

Harry closed the duffle bag he was using and threw it over his shoulder, "I know, I know. Now conjure me some thermite dust and let's get this show on the road. The portkey for Ile Chevreau goes off at four on the dot."

Remus grimaced and moved his wand in a complicated pattern, resulting in a small pouch appearing on a table in the room, black/red powder spilling from the brim.

"Excellent! You know you're going to teach me how to do that, right?"

Remus ruffled Harry's hair before donning his balaclava, obscuring his face save for his eyes and mouth, "In your dreams. You don't need more tools to get you into trouble. Consider yourself lucky I'm even letting you come along."

"You're lucky I didn't try to obliviate you when you found me out."

Nym was fairly sure he looked offended, but with the face masking headwear on it was hard to tell, "You wouldn't dare!"

"Well I would have stunned you first. And then it would probably take me a few trys," Harry looked rather introspective, "But I would have definitely left you your college years!" he finished brightly.

"I didn't go to college."

Harry waved the older man off, "You would have when I was done."

Nym was still very certain that Remus looked offended. In her mind she was struggling to not see Harry do something like that. He was just crazy enough. Of all people in the entire world to get an under-aged magic exemption, of course he would.

With just a thought Harry looked like Minister Cornelius Fudge, at which point he applied his own Balaklava. The two men readied a few different bags and small pouches hanging across their bodies.

Harry stuck his hand out, Remus shook it, and they both grabbed for a long cord sitting alone on a side table. Remus readied his wand and made to tap the cord, prompting Nym to jump from the shadow she was hiding in to snatch one end of the cord.

Harry managed to squeak out, "Nym?" in the moment before they all disappeared in a flash of multicolored light.

* * *

><p>After a few moments transit time, they landed in a wide and dimly lit room. From somewhere deep within the room a voice rang out, "Welcome to the Ministry of Magic."<p> 


	32. Chapter 30: ESCAAAAAAAAPE!

Chapter 30: The British Virgin Islands are nice this time of year

Of course, the next sound to spread itself thinly amidst the columns and fireplaces belonged to an uninvited guest (on reflection Harry realized it was actually a _third_ uninvited guest), "Yes, Harry?"

Remus had his wand trained on the girl, in her very diminutive form, dressed in sheep slippers, silk pants, and a black turtle neck. Harry just pressed his hand to his face, well, Minister Fudge's face.

It was the way of things.

Their portkeys were all one way. Remus knew a guy who knew a guy... and they had transport. He hadn't asked questions. He should have.

"Nymphadora?"

The girl grew a solid six inches and put on two stone of muscle at the name, her face turning an alarming shade of red. Harry knew what was coming next and decided that if his very first jailbreak was starting out so bad he might as well do away with all their operational security. With a deft flick and twist a silencing ward surrounded the three of them in their dark corner of the receiving hall of the ministry atrium.

"IT"S TONKS! or nym if it has to be, NOT NYMPHADORA! AND I'LL HAVE YOU KNOW-"

"-SHUT UP!"

Both turned at Harry's much louder shout. If he hadn't put up the silencing ward himself he would have also cringed. He could tell that Remus was gonna go all adult on this, and he could tell that Nym was gonna go all stubborn kid, and he had time for exactly none of it. They were on a rigid schedule.

Harry closed his eyes and decided to go with the first thing that popped into his head. Flying by the seat of his pants was his one absolute talent after all. He opened his eyes again, and with his desired form in mind clearly said, "_SetonixBrachyurus"_

Nym's form twisted insanely before him, bending in on itself until the only thing standing where she had been was a one foot tall juvenile quokka. It stood on its hind legs, and after it snapped out of the realization that it had just been transfigured, it looked at itself. Deep chestnut fur covered it from head to tail.

It looked up at Harry with a curious expression. In a human it would have been amazement and betrayal and confusion, but on the face of an adorable little fur ball it just looked confused and pleased.

That was why Harry liked quokka, they never didn't look happy.

From his place four feet away, wand still trained on the now much smaller girl, Remus looked on with confusion writ across every line and feature of his face.

Seemingly unconcerned with any of the developments in the emotional states of his now _two_ companions, Harry was busy taking a small length of cloth from his pocket and transfiguring it into a chest sling, like new parents might keep their child in.

Harry placed the sling around himself, and before the critter could squeak out an indignant complaint had it securely attached to himself. Looking down at it on his chest he channeled his inner McGonagall for a moment, "Later. You got yourself into this, and we are on a schedule."

The werewolf pulled himself together from having witnessed a not-quite-thirteen year old perform a complex post-NEWT level transfiguration to throw a questioning look at his too-young-for-this partner in crime.

Harry's stern facade cracked, "What? Fred and George Weasley needed a little help, so I _may_ have done a little hunting in the restricted arithmancy section for them on the condition they share what they used it for with me."

The adult in him could not help but disapprove, and some part of it must have shown on his face.

"What, werewolf-breaking-into-the-ministry-and-Azkaban-with-a-twelve-year-old?"

Mooney had to close his eyes against a moment of hypocritical pain. When he opened them again he was looking at a professional burglar and escape artist. Wearing Fudge's face. With an inquisitive looking furry mammal bound by silk cloth to his chest.

They were so screwed.

* * *

><p>Disillusionments and silencing charms were passed between the two guys and the small furry mammal. Remus had bought Harry's assertion that by the time the breakout was noticed, their signatures here would be hopelessly degraded, and so let himself be talked into just biting the bullet and starting things.<p>

That and they wanted to save death's own cloak for a more vital moment.

The front security desk was manned by a bored looking twenty-something in a standard auror robe. He appeared to have missed the shouting earlier and instead of staying alert, had chosen to conjure a mirror and pick at his teeth with his wand.

Harry and Remus both jumped a desk on the opposite side of the hall and made their ways past.

The atrium was dead, as they had expected at midnight, but the lack of people didn't detract from how impressive it was. Golden runes fluttered about overhead like butterflies, giving dim light to the room and providing security. Each functioned somewhat like a magical security camera, so despite their beauty, Harry and Remus were quick to leave their gaze.

Moving through the first ring of secretarial desks and other assorted lackey checkpoints, the pair passed into Wizengamot office territory. The legally sanctioned geezers of the UK's magical government hadn't wanted to have to move far when the building was designed, so their offices were all on the first floor while the workers that actually ran the government were relegated to other levels.

That predilection for laziness was like manna from heaven for a pair of aspiring jailbreak artists.

They passed through three distinct tiers of empty secretarial desks before getting into offices of any actual importance. The average Wizengamot member's office was a veritable clusterfuck of monitoring, counter intrusion, and privacy wards. The magic used to protect the office's occupants from one another was so intense that in some places it leaked into the visible spectrum as an eerie colorless glow that only appeared at the edge of one's sight.

They evidently took their privacy and the privacy of their files seriously, which only served to ignite a fire in the part of Harry's conscience that called out for him to take anything shiny that wasn't nailed to the ground. He ruthlessly suppressed it though, despite his burning desire to figure out what the holder of the Marchbanks seat was hiding behinds those wards.

You know, if he popped a set of nullifier runes into small divots at the corners of the door frame and tried to activate them with a push inward...

No, bad Harry, no petty larceny.

As one might expect from a group of hereditary politicians, there wasn't a soul in the office complex after hours. Harry and Mooney had a straight shot without interruption from the first desk they passed all the way back to the stairs at the rear of the wing that went directly to the Department of Magical Law enforcement offices. Lord only knew why the wizengamot thought they needed a link to the one office in the ministry they had spent nearly a decade and a half de-funding, but then maybe it was built in a more forward thinking time.

Harry's illicit building plans weren't dated and he had felt no compulsion to ask questions. Actually he felt a compulsion to just burn the building down and start again, but as Nym was so intent on getting through his head, widespread government crashing is for revolutionaries _over_ the age of majority. Harry suspected she was just delaying him until she could find a better argument, but it gave him time to plan so he let it go.

Getting to the DMLE offices was a piece of cake, but finding their way through them was just a bit harder. Like he had spent so much time complaining to his mum about, the DMLE bullpen of auror desks was very much like a maze.

So much like a maze that it was, in point of fact, a maze.

The shoulder high walls were enchanted for basic privacy and sound cancelling, but at the same time the designer of the area had included a rather amusing set of semi-self aware furniture rearrangement and intent wards. The more mayhem and mischief you had on the mind, the harder it was to get where you were intending on going.

Amelia had been amused at the time when she had explained it to Harry, citing that his naturally felonious mind had finally revealed itself. As he and Remus stood in front of an actively shifting matrix of desks whose walls were literally growing taller and thicker before their eyes, Harry found it less amusing than he had when she had first explained it.

Intent sensing indeed.

Harry started forward towards the nearest desk regardless of the movement of the walls, and as he arrived he immediately set to going through the drawers and files. It took him a solid minute to realize that he was alone. Remus stood in the doorway to the bullpen, and appeared to be completely stunned by the moving walls in front of him. They had thankfully stopped growing when they hit the roof, though Harry suspected they were still getting thicker.

With his hand still inside the drawer of the desk he was at, Harry looked up and said, "What, you didn't think it would be _that_ easy, did you? Not everyone around here is as stupid as they look."

The aspiring... actually in fairness that didn't apply to him, Remus at this stage was an actual felon depending on which nation's standards you chose to apply.

The decidedly felonious werewolf gestured weakly at the sight before him and managed to get out a weak, "What?"

Harry returned to his rooting through auror desks and answered idly, "Oh yeah, intent sensing wards and a curious mix of animation and house-elf-inspired movement charms. You and I intend some fairly serious mayhem, so they're in a kind of lockdown. Now I know what you're thinking," Harry moved from the innumerable drawers to an overly laden filing cabinet next to the desk, "Aren't they gonna notice? Won't this register somewhere? And I asked Amelia the same thing, but think about it, the average copper here was appointed via nepotism and despite Amelia's best efforts, likely skims a bit off the top."

Remus was impressed by Harry's sticking to character, despite the fuzzy animal strapped to his chest. Harry gave up on that particular desk and moved to the next one in the line, around a wall that now seemed to be slowly transfiguring itself from some kind of particle board to some kind of metal.

"Hell, even the honest ones are tempted, they make less than the janitor that cleans up after me. They all intend a bit of mayhem, so everyone'd be lost in an afternoon if the aurors didn't have a pass through, and so... voila!"

Harry removed his arm from a drawer, obviously extended given how he was up to his shoulder in the thing, and from his hand hung a badge on a small chain.

"Put a hand on my shoulder, old bean, and let's do this!"

Remus looked at the shining badge Harry had ceremoniously hung around the transformed Nymphadora's neck. Auror second class, John Dawlish.

He smiled, at least they were framing the right people for this.

* * *

><p>The warden of Azkaban is a unique position. Well, unique in the magical world. Some mundanes occupied a similar position, the president of the United States, any CEO of a Fortune 500 company before the 1980s, the sedated prisoner inside the costume used in the popular children's show Barney and Friends...<p>

At any rate, the Warden of Azkaban was a unique position in the magical world, for it was a job position so terrible that the only way to get someone to agree to it for any kind of extended period of time was to give them perks equal in weight to the amount of time they had to spend exposed to dementors.

To that end, the office of the warden was easily on the list of the most luxurious in the entire ministry, lagging only behind the wealthier wizengamot members and the office of the manager of the 'Reelect Cornelius Fudge' campaign.

The warden's office gained no small part of its charm from the fact that it was used to house the repository of patronus charged amulets that gave the average prisoner transfer guard the boost necessary to survive for the small amount of time they spent on that god forsaken rock in the North Sea. The amount of positive, some might even say holy, energy in one place filled the office constantly with cheerfulness. Plants grew in abundance, making it smell like the world's finest garden, regardless of the fact that there was only a miniature ficus on the fake window sill.

No matter what time of day you entered, it always initially smelled like a bakery in the morning, and when you left the office seemed to ring with just a hint of sorrow that you were gone. Coffee never went stale, and the whiskey the warden kept locked in his desk never failed to taste like it had been aged for half a lifetime.

Into this atmosphere walked a fake Cornelius Fudge with a quokka on his stomach, and a tall and somewhat gaunt man wearing a thick balaclava.

"You sure there'll be a portkey here?"

"I told you I'd take care of everything, didn't I? It'll be here."

"It's just you had me take care of all of the rest of the transportation, I can't help but be nervous about the piece I left up to you."

The boy cleverly disguised as one of the least competent ministers of magic in the last millennia look fiercely at his masked colleague, "Hey, whose plan was this? Who was just gonna let him rot in jail, hmm? If I say I have it, then I have it. There should be a prisoner transport in," the Fudge look-a-like went to examine his watch, only to be impeded for the fourth or fifth time by the curious and still mildly indignant creature on his breast, heaving a sigh he dropped his hand to his side, "ten or eleven hours. Now the current warden is a man named Gervillian Swike, and he spends a grand total of fifteen minutes a week ensuring his territory is covered. He has not once used the traditional ferry to get there, and according to second hand information I purchased from an unpleasant fellow named Mudungus, his secretary claims that he stores his only mildly illegal portkey in the right hand drawer of his desk under a definitely illegal blood warded latch. Now!" Harry said, raising a single finger in the air, as if announcing a discovery, "shut up and help me break into this desk."

Remus examined his own watch. 12:38. They had roughly accounted for how long it was taking them. Sirius' escape was planned for 4 on the dot, and they expected to be inside Azkaban by 1:15 at the latest. He hadn't been particularly familiar with what the DMLE was guarding itself with these days, back when James and Sirius had been thinking about becoming aurors it had been an especially devilish carpet that had an awful tendency to occasionally escape and wind up in the possession of various Irish organized crime groups. The insane moving desks had thrown him for a loop.

Looking at the warden's blood warded desk however, this was something he could do. Going to his knees next to the boy with him, he ran his hands along the inside of the desk. It wasn't uncommon for there to be a second, third, or fourth secret drawer. Even an alternate entrance to the same drawer. It wasn't exactly thinking outside the box, but with the pureblood community it was a possibility.

Thinking outside the box was often the answer to these problems though. There was an attack routing concept he had seen in an off month he spent in Israel, the idea was that if a defender was hiding in a city, on a particular street, at a particular address, they had certain expectations. One travels through a city using roads. So they block intersections and funnel traffic. One undergoes rapid insertion via helicopter (Remus still didn't get how the blade things held the body of it up, but he took solace in knowing what one was in the first place), so the defender keeps their eyes to the sky and their rifles pointed up. Things like that.

What the defender does_ not_ expect, is for the attacker to have a half dozen shaped charges available to pass through the walls of the neighboring buildings, appearing in the middle of the apartment or housing block with guns blazing.

Now while he may only have his Soviet midnight special with him (totally unsuited to that task, without modification anyway), he could apply that doctrine to this situation with a bit of force applied correctly.

"Cornelius, the sledgehammer."

Harry's hesitation could have been written off as a delayed reaction to his assumed identity, but given the wicked smile that lit up the boy's face as he began rooting through their bottomless bag, Remus chose to assume he spent the moment working out the plan.

With an almighty swing, the werewolf broke open the whole side of the desk, and with it the drawer. Harry's quick hands retrieved the portkey from the wooden wreckage, nearly bumping Nym's small furry head on the desk in the process.

Harry yelped as she turned around and gave the nearest piece of loose flesh a solid bite, while Remus had to again stifle a somewhat manic laugh at their situation. He had never before appreciated the fact that Minister Fudge really did have an impressive set of man boobs on him.

The boy looked down at his companion angrily and passed the small pink child's sock to his adult counterpart, who took the object gently between two fingers and with a mildly disgusted air.

"I never got why they used random junk like this for the average portkey. I'm for recycling as much as the next fellow, but this?"

Harry nodded absently in agreement as he rooted through the duffel for the next part of the plan. Retrieving the dimensional clamps, the 4th dimensional compass (which Harry was still convinced was simply a regular compass Remus spellotaped a wristwatch to), and an object his comrade in arms described as a 'fizzler', Harry set up the workstation Remus required on the now only mostly stable desk.

If they had been willing to use their wands, it would have been a snap to change the operating time of the portkey they had just stolen, but outside wand use, modifications like that required the set of tools Harry prepped for the more experienced wizard.

While the lycanthrope got busy defying conventional physics and wondering just why the hell the warden of the most horrifying prison on earth had a child's sock lying about, Harry began collecting the patronus amulets.

Another quick swing with the sledgehammer got them access to the cabinet filled with the things, and likely to meet the spirit of the larceny he had not allowed himself to commit earlier, Harry swiped a double handful of the things. Each amulet was different, yet at the same time each was of a similar form. On a perfectly round piece of a metal that seemed too pure and shiny to be silver, an animal was carved in bass relief. Many were of the same animal, likely having been forged or enchanted by the same person, but even then each was different. Perhaps a different memory was used? Harry wasn't quite sure. The walrus that stood proudly on the front of a number of the things had definitely been captured from several angles and in a few different positions.

How did one convince a Walrus to pose? Obviously the patronus was just a magical construct, but all the same. Harry couldn't help but picture a photographer in the middle of a blacksmith's forge, wildly ordering a one tonne sea-mammal to 'work it'.

Harry shook his head and diverted his attention back to Remus. They were committing felonies right now, and if he kept going, that line of thought led to madness.

* * *

><p>Remus had seen a lot of things in his life.<p>

He once saw a dragon raid a brewery and then attempt to get intimate with a passing train.

During school he had seen a pair of Ravenclaws express their appreciation for Severus Snape's... intellect... in an abandoned classroom.

In the fall of '87 he had been shot by a lucky private in the Urals, spending his recovery time in the 'hospital' of an unnamed gulag in the region.

Nothing he had ever been witness to could have come close to preparing him for Azkaban.

Even with an even dozen of Harry's swiped amulets around his neck, and being inside the warden's office on the dark and unplottable island in the North Sea, he could feel the suffering that had taken place there. A shared glance with Harry and their unintentional third made it clear that they all felt the same way.

The air was heavy, filled with the death and suffering of countless souls across centuries of time. In truth no one knew the history of the island. It had been found 'as-is' and if the notes in the margins of the Goblin plans were accurate, the island actively resisted changes. A wall had been knocked down and a few enchanted boilers and windows installed for the Warden when he spent time on the island and they periodically regenerated, prompting the ministry to hire a wrecking crew to go back to Azkaban and break the new wall bisecting the office.

There was a malevolence in the air, and with every breath Harry and Remus could feel it driving hope from their minds.

The two men and small mammal looked at each other and set out for the high security cells, Harry retrieving his map as they exited the office.

As always though,it's funny how the little things are what come around to bite you in the ass.

In this case it was Harry's missing something. Specifically he missed the small warning engraved on the case containing the patronus amulets.

_A patronus amulet is part of a complete dementor defense._

Maybe some DMLE dolt made a fatal mistake, leading to a warning being mandated. Maybe some first generation witch or wizard made the engraving as a joke after a tough shift escorting some prisoner and while making plans to grab dinner.

In the end it didn't matter. What _did_ matter was that as Harry, Remus, and Nym in the form of a small furry mammal crossed the bounds from 'medium security' to 'high security', they noticed that they were receiving a bit more attention from the local crowd.

"Hey," the Cornelius Fudge look-alike said, as he smacked his hand to his compatriots shoulder, "that dementor is staring at me."

"You're mad."

Remus' retort might have meant more to Harry if he hadn't been looking keenly into each cell to try and see who had been arrested and- wait- was that Bellatrix Black?

You never knew who you would run into these days.

Harry refocused, "I'm telling you, that dementor is eyeballing me, and now he's got a friend!"

They had moved on and Remus appeared to be trying to spit on Rodolphus Lestrange before checking the next cell. Between attempts he said, "Cornelius, they don't have eyes, how can they possibly be eyeballing you?"

The two dementors that had been shadowing them turned into three and then shortly into six. The rescue crew was getting close to where they thought Sirius was, but by the time they had closed with the cell, the crowd of hell spawn in cloaks had grown to fifteen. Harry figured that had to be the entire population of the level they were on, and they were nearing the maximum security.

Harry smacked his partner in crime again, "There are a lot more of them, and I think it's more 'piece of meat' eyeballing, and not just 'stranger in my house' eyeballing."

Remus finished checking out the next cell and turned to Harry, before his admonishment could leave his lips he caught the now horde of floating soul-sucking demon things still barely keeping their distance and decided to change his comment to, "Oh. Bugger."

The lycanthrope began furiously rooting through his bag, and Harry looked dubiously at him, "We can't cast patronuses. Patroni. Whatever. That would leave our signatures all over this damn place."

Mooney kept up his rooting, removing a bunch of rather sinister looking pieces of metal from his satchel as he responded, "You start looking for Sirius, I got this."

Harry wanted to protest, but as he had reminded Nym, they were on a schedule. He liked his freedom, which protecting himself would surely make more difficult to maintain. On the other hand he enjoyed having a soul. He shrugged, they were past that whole point of no return thing, might as well get on with it.

Without further complaint Harry hurriedly took over the duty of checking each cell for his estranged godparent as they began moving faster. Why the ministry didn't just label the bloody cells he didn't know.

The next portkey was set to go off in thirty-four minutes, and-Good lord was that Franklin Rosier? This place was a damn who's who of wizarding Britain's finest families. Harry had to frown for a moment, that really explained a lot, didn't it?

In four more cells they finally found their target, a black dog with a thick shaggy coat curled up under a cot, whimpering. Harry turned from his job back to Remus, only to find one of his nightmares come to life.

Harry wasn't afraid of a lot, but there were some things that struck his subconscious as being particularly worthy of terror. Naturally for a man who willingly entered single combat with a troll and a basilisk, they were more advanced than the average man's fear, usually in the form of a combination of two or more normal fears.

In this case: Werewolf with a grenade launcher.

"Hey... There... Friend... What's that you got there?"

Mooney appeared lost in thought as he caressed a thick receiver and clearly modified trigger mechanism, "Mmmmm, a memory from my days back with my family. _Plamya_... Technically the AGS-17, it weighs thirty one kilogrammes and it fires thirty millimeter explosive cartridges in either a direct or indirect support role at four hundred rounds per minute."

From Harry's chest Nym made a questioning noise, and while Harry was caught between terror at an automatic grenade launcher in a three by three meter corridor and the still growing crowd of dementors, Remus went on.

"It's... It's just _sexy_. The thump in your chest when it fires, and the second thump you feel in your balls when the grenade goes off. I remember when we ran through the North Urals ITL so we could get my cousin out. They had me climb up one of the guard towers and harass the men in the barracks with one of these babies..."

"Shouldn't we not use one of those inside? Inside a tiny hallway at least? Wouldn't we just end up killing Sirius?"

Remus ran a hand down the small body of the gun, small runes lighting up as his hand passed them, "Well Cornelius old boy, do you trust me?"

Harry swallowed hard and looked back into the cell with his godfather in it, "I don't like this."

Remus lifted his balaclava as far as his mouth, and bit into his left thumb. Blood welled from the wound, and faster than it could drop from his finger to the ground Remus smeared it on the runes, which lit up even brighter, before flashing like the noonday sun, blinding the three ambitious felons and the crowd of dementors.

When Harry could see again, he found a massive translucent barrier across the hallway between them and the demon-spawn, extending visibly through the cells at either of their sides, and anchored evidently to the barrel of the terrifying gun.

Remus had a mad look in his eye, "Well old bean, three specialized bubblehead charms should do it, eh? Now, have I ever told you how much I've found Tony Montana's story to be a guiding light in my life?"

Turning to face the dementors (and consequently causing the bubblehead wall to move in an eye-twisting manner) Remus cried out, "SAY HELLO TO MY LITTLE FRIEND!"

Harry shuddered. In his nightmare the werewolf had shouted that too. Remus began firing wildly into the crowd of floating horrors, a belt of the 30mm projectiles feeding into the grenade launcher from the bottomless satchel at his side.

It was said that nothing could truly kill a dementor, but Harry had a feeling these ones wouldn't be giving them much trouble all the same.

Turning from the muted explosions and booming cough of Remus' favorite toy, Harry went to the door hiding their target. His nimble fingers removed a familiar bag from his pocket, and with some minor difficulty he managed to pour a great deal of the thing's dusty contents into the workings of the lock. Removing a coil of shiny wire from another pouch, he thrust as much as he could into the mechanism, trying to bury it in the dust, and with a flick of a lighter got the reaction started. There was an intense pulse of heat and a huge cloud of smoke released, the fire spit out heated droplets of iron and whatever the lock was made of, causing Harry to turn his back to it.

Remus was bust shouting some fairly intense racial epithets at the dementor crowd, Harry enjoyed the terrible view for a moment, and when the heat receded at his back he turned around to the cage again.

With a kick, it cracked open, revealing a curious and mangy man.

In a voice that had seen over a decade of disuse Sirius rasped out, "Minister."

The fake-Fudge's face broke into a wide smile, "Good to see you again, old friend, but we'd best be on our way."

Remus stepped backwards into the room, still firing bursts into the swarm down the hall, "We going or what?"

"Keep your pants on old man, we're going, we're going!" came the annoyed response.

Harry turned back to Sirius, who looked more shocked by the second, and waved a rope in his face, "Grab a hold, old bean, and we'll be off!"

* * *

><p>The newly formed quartet spent the next twenty minutes in a strobing burst of colors that had no name. The rope portkey was set to jump them innumerable times across the whole island, each time they landed they had less than a second to adjust before being thrown into whatever kind of sub-space nonsense the portkey utilized.<p>

By the time they hit their end-point, they stood on the white cliffs of Dover with a mangy man and a juvenile quokka vomiting violently over the edge.

Harry seemed incredibly pleased to have survived the experience, and Remus looked rather disappointed to no longer have targets to fire his favorite gun at. The bubblehead wall still extended nearly fifteen meters out to either side, wobbling violently as the werewolf shook the gun in an attempt to disable it.

By the time the translucent wall finally disappeared with a very audible pop, the two mammals who had just been sick had recovered, each wanting an explanation for what just happened. Harry morphed his features back to something recognizably human instead of distinctly politician, and he and his partner in crime both turned to their questioners.

A quick _tempus_ revealed that they had five minutes until Remus and Sirius were due off, and the explanation began.

"I'm your godson!"

Okay, explanation was a strong word.

Sirius blinked, entirely nonplussed, "Huh?"

"We broke you out of jail because we know you're innocent!"

Sirius looked between the man still wearing a balaclava and the curious fur ball next to him.

"Huh?"

The pair of criminals both exclaimed, "Oh right!"

Remus removed the cloth blocking his face, and Harry reversed the transfiguration on Nym, both acts only confusing the man further.

"Nym, this is your uncle Sirius Black, Sirius, this is Nymphadora! I think you should remember her."

The aforementioned Nymphadora immediately began turning red, which did seem to cause a flash of recognition in his eyes, but for some reason he still seemed lost. Harry couldn't help but think that his godfather would be much more on his game without twelve years of dementor exposure, but it was what it was.

"Andi's daughter... I loved Andi..."

Sirius still looked lost, and Harry could almost understand.

He stood hunched, as if he was drawn up into himself. He looked like the night air, free and flowing around him, hurt him. He wasn't sure what to do with it. It stung. It was too fresh, too free. He had lived for the last twelve or so years in depleted and depressed air, air which saw a breeze maybe once a month. His 'new' air in the place he came from was made up of the foul breath of beings too nasty for a nine to five job and a shitty apartment in hell.

But he was stolen from the only world he had known for twelve years by a man wearing Cornelius fudge's face, a man wearing a skiing mask, and a thirteen year old girl in the form of a small west Australian animal.

Then the clock hit 3:59 AM Greenwich mean time, and Remus and the new jail escapee had somewhere to be.

The werewolf slapped a sticker to Sirius' back (My Other Ride Is YOUR MOM!) and held his hand there, saying, "Well kids, it's been fun. I got to fire my grenade launcher, we broke your uncle out of prison, Harry sodomized the jail warden so we could get in, but we really have to-"

Then in a flash of light the pair disappeared.

Nymphadora Sophia Tonks stood stock still, facing the English Channel. Wind blew over the white cliffs of Dover, tugging gently on the edges of her turtle neck and ruffling the fake fur of her puffy black sheep slippers.

You could see the white crests of waves breaking in the channel, long thin lines curving with the land as far as the eye could see, the moonlight glinting in the dark.

"Harry, did we just-"

"Yeah."

"I guess the Goblins said-"

"Yep."

They shared a quiet moment.

"So I can't-"

"We'd really prefer you didn't."

It was very dark, but between the moonlight and how close they were Harry could make out every line of her face. He stared quietly.

"Aunt Amy is not gonna like this."

"Yeah..."

He trailed off, letting his words fade into the darkness and sounds of the ocean.

"Glad you tagged along?"

"Kinda."

"That's good," he said rather hopefully.

"Doesn't mean you're not gonna pay for making me into a fur ball."

Harry sighed.

"I was afraid you were gonna say that."


End file.
